Todd McFarlane's Biggest Goal For The Upcoming Spawn Reboot - Exclusive
Comic creator Todd McFarlane's works have been adapted to screen many times over the past three decades. His two most prominent creations, Venom and Spawn, have been seen in many movies, TV shows, and various other nebulous projects. Soon, he'll be directing his first ever move: a new adaptation of "Spawn." McFarlane helped produce the 1997 movie starring Michael Jai White, and he'll helm a reboot himself.
Looper recently spoke with McFarlane, and he told us about his plans for the movie. The most important part: Accuracy to the comics isn't the most important part, not by a long shot. "When I go do my 'Spawn' movie," he said, "if it doesn't look like the comic books or any of the toys I've done, that's okay. As long as the people who like movies and go to movies and pay for movies enjoyed their movie." He said that his mindset is "don't let any tails wag the dog."
What works best > source material accuracy
While discussing the "Venom" movies, McFarlane made it clear that the entertainment value derived from a film is far more important than fealty to the source material. His "How many people buy the Venom comic book? I don't know, a hundred thousand people. How many buy Spawn, hundred thousand? There's 8 billion people, which basically means that 99.99% of the people don't buy the comic book for either one of those characters." Entertaining the millions of people who see movies over the few hundred thousand who read the comics is the financially sound choice.
McFarlane is aware that fans who know the characters inside and out will have their thoughts, but he has one request: "You can give me all your comments, we can have a nice debate, but I'm still going to ask you at the end the one ... question that matters: 'Did I entertain you for two hours?' And either I did, or I didn't. And the loyalty, the exactness of that translation shouldn't be the determining factor. Your entertainment is all that matters."
"Venom: Let There Be Carnage" is now available on digital, 4K UHD, Blu-Ray, and DVD.