Jamie Foxx is set to star in Spawn, the Blumhouse film that marks the directorial debut of Todd McFarlane from his scripted adaptation of his comic book creation. Foxx will play the character who started out in the comics as Al Simmons, a member of a CIA black ops team who is betrayed twice. After being set up by his cohorts to be murdered with his corpse set aflame, Simmons is double crossed in Hell.

“Jamie came to my office five years ago, and he had an idea about Spawn and we talked about it,” McFarlane said. “I never forgot him, and when I was writing this script, you sort of plug people in, and he was my visual guy and I never let go of him. When I got done and my agents and everybody was talking about what actor, I said, I’m going to Jamie first and until he says no I don’t want to think about anyone else because I’ve never had anyone else in my head. Luckily, he hadn’t forgotten either. I said, ‘Hey, I’m back to talk about Spawn again, and he was like, let’s do it.'”

I’m mentally exhausted from origin stories. Luckily, there’s a movie that just came out that helps my cause. In A Quiet Place, the first thing on screen is a card in black and white letters that says Day 89. It doesn’t care about what happened in those first 88 days. There are a couple headlines, but then we are on day 450. That movie doesn’t worry about explaining and giving all the answers. What it said in that case was, if you can hang on for a story of survival of this family, this movie will make complete sense for you.”

I knew the person on screen the most is this police officer, Twitch Williams. We needed as strong a person as possible because he will be the face of the film. I took my naïve Hollywood approach again, and said let’s start at the top and work down. Jeremy was at the top. I’m a huge fan of his. The character doesn’t need to be a bodybuilder or GQ handsome. I was looking for somebody who’s a person you’ve met before; I needed someone who can pull off the grief of an average human being. I’ve seen Jeremy do that in more than a few of his movies. He was at the top of my list, just like Jamie.”

Can we expect the new Spawn film to give us an Spawn origin story or it will it mostly be a mystery that is pieced together from Sam and Twitchs' perspective?

No origin story. It eats away time to do cool stuff.

Any news on the Violator being cast in the upcoming movie? I would love so see John Leguizamo reprise his role.

No Violator in the upcoming movie!

Since Twitch is going to be in the Spawn reboot, is Sam too?

No

"I'm glad you asked. There has been an enormous amount of activity on Spawn,"
"No new news that I'm going to reveal here, I'm sorry to tell you, but the title 'Spawn,' I've been uttering that word a lot in the last two or three weeks and we'll have more news to come. But, suffice it to say, it is a very active development."

"We got an offer out to, I think, a bigger fish. So, there weren't too many bigger than the first guy, but anyway, we'll see. If I could've got the last guy, it would've been a home run. If I can get this guy, it will be a grand slam. This one will blow up the Internet. So, we'll see. I don't know. In normal circumstances, usually when you make an offer, there's usually a one or two-week sort of timeframe before you move on. But given that everything stopped in Hollywood, probably in the grace period we'll be relaxed. I think it would be, like I said, I'm going to only have to go down after this, if I lose these two big whales. But fingers crossed on this one. So, again, everybody's saying the right things for right now, but until you get a firm 'yes' it's always a 'no' to me."

"We sort of agreed to let some veteran hand sort of have their go at it. We've got a couple huge, big-name writers who are in the middle of the process now and I think when those names go public, it's going to blow people away. We actually just got an update yesterday, so all of that is still moving forward,"
"Once that script gets to the place we're at, I'm guessing with the pedigree of everybody I've already got, plus the names of the writers, it will be a fairly easy sell with that story; it's still moving and grinding."

"My two detective characters Sam Burke and 'Twitch' Williams appeared in the very first issue of Spawn #1 back in 1992. Since then, they've become fan favorites and have branched out into their own comic series throughout the years,"
"Their stories, blending traditional crime noir and the supernatural, is a combination that I've always thought would make for an entertaining television drama. The addition of wiip and the creative writing skills of Jason Smilovic and Todd Katzberg make for a very compelling team that we all hope leads to the entertaining show we know this can be. If you like cool, moody, creepy, odd crime stories, this will be your cup of tea!"

Initial reports for the planned Spawn movie included Twitch. Is that project its own separate animal?
Yeah, and I'd argue the same for Spawn too. I look at Batman as a roadmap for any character, big or small, which is there's Batman in the movies, with more than five different actors in the role; there's the TV shows, like with Adam West. Then there's animated looks and comic book looks and video game looks. There's a lot of iterations of what we would term as Batman. The question is who are you, as an individual, and what from these presentations make sense to you as an individual? It's like a buffet of choices for the same character, take which one you want. I don't think any character has to be exactly the same in very format that they're in. They can have nuances that aren't in other places.

Last month it was announced Brian Tucker is going to take a crack at the movie script. What about his vision for the project impressed you to bring him on board?
Well, it wasn't just my decision. There's a handful of other people working on it that we haven't announced yet. One of the people working on it: that is going to be a big name when we finally get to announce it. I think he said he went through close to a hundred scripts by as many people as he could. We were looking ideally for someone that could bring a voice to the character on two levels: I'm just a white, Canadian kid. I haven't lived the life of a man in America of someone with dark skin. We thought it was important to get the perspective of somebody who has, someone with that perspective coming in and adding a slightly different bent to what you and I, as comic book readers, already know as to what Spawn is about.
I didn't want to do the comic book origin story from Issues #1-3 in the movie. We were looking for people, without even telling them that, to give something a little bit different. Unfortunately, 80-90% of them, according to the other person involved who was interviewing most of them, were falling into the trap of retelling the comic book story in the movie. We saw that movie, that movie came out 20+ years ago from New Line. So what haven't we seen that would be interesting and relevant today, both in terms of filmmaking and social content.

"We're still moving forward on the movie,"

"We were debating whether to make a big announcement because we've been adding pieces to it here at San Diego. So all the parties that were involved, we had the conversation: 'Do we make the announcement here or do we wait and keep our gunpowder dry until New York Comic Con?' And we eventually said we'll do it at New York."