As comic book movie adaptations continue to smash the box office and dominate the film industry, the news of which Hollywood A-lister is going to play which hero or villain is always hotly anticipated.
And, while some actors can’t help but blur the edges between their character and themselves (here’s looking at you, Reynolds and Jackman), some thespians are a little harder to pin down.
Jamie Foxx has finally agreed to play the part of Spawn in an upcoming reboot of the dark comic.
Foxx will play the titular character, an ex-CIA operative who is betrayed and double-crossed. I won’t give it all away, but after going through some pretty dark stuff, he comes back as a demon-like antihero, intent on cleansing his city of all those who get on his bad side.
Spawn was created by Todd McFarlane, who has penned the script and will also be directing the new film Deadline reports.
The comic was big in the 90s, and was turned into a film starring Michael Jai White and John Leguizamo in 1997. Creator McFarlane has been getting requests to reboot the franchise for some time now, but has held off bigger offers to create his own gritty, low budget version with Blumhouse Productions.
McFarlane has said he expects the budget to be between $10 million and $12 million for a dark, R-rated imagining of his film.
He also expects Spawn to be a man of few words. Speaking to Deadline, McFarlane said:
The scariest movies, from Jaws to John Carpenter’s The Thing, or The Grudge and The Ring, the boogeyman doesn’t talk.
This is not a man in a rubber suit, it’s not a hero that’s going to come and save the damsel. It’s none of that. At the end of the movie, I’m hoping that the audience will say either, is this a ghost that turns into a man, or is it a man that turns into a ghost?
I’ve got a trilogy in mind here, and I’m not inclined in this first movie to do an origin story. I’m mentally exhausted from origin stories.
If you’re expecting an anti-hero like Deadpool, think again.
So why the choice of Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx for a man of such few words?
McFarlane said:
There are five or six moments where I’m going to need things from my actors, and a couple of them have to come from Jamie, and I’ve seen him deliver them onscreen.
He gets into a zone, with body language and a look that basically will say way more than anything I could type on a piece of paper, and this movie is going to need those moments. And in the odd moment where he has to deliver a line that’s short, curt and has impact, he can do it in a way that makes you go, ‘Whoa, I don’t want to mess with that guy. What a badass.
A release date hasn’t yet been confirmed, but as comic book films move away from shiny superheroes thanks to the likes of Venom, we can’t wait to see this.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.