Spawn Movie Won't Be An Origin Story

The upcoming Spawn film won't bother wasting time recounting the character's origin story, according to Todd McFarlane. The creator, who is pulling double-duty as writer-director for the 2019 film, says he's finds movies that spend time on the backstory "exhausting."

"I can't do it. I can't do it," McFarlane told Comic Book. "I've seen too many movies that spend way too much time for the set-up." To illustrate his point, he referenced another gruff anti-hero. "Why do you think Wolverine was so popular? Because we didn't know who he was for a long, long time. And that's what made him cool. And you can argue that it's like he became a little bit less cool... once you actually gave the origin away, right? I sort of liked him when he was like a mystery.”

In both the comics and the film, Spawn is a CIA black ops agent who was betrayed and murdered. After finding himself in Hell for all of his killing of innocents, he makes a bargain with a demon to return to earth to see his wife. But bargains with demons rarely go as planned, so he's sent back hideously disfigured, trapped in his suit, and years after his wife has moved on with her life.

This is similar to comments McFarlane made when the casting of Jamie Foxx was announced, saying he wanted to do a trilogy and didn't intend for the first film to be an origin story. In fact, it sounds like the character of Spawn might not just lack an origin story, but almost any story whatsoever. McFarlane has compared this take on the character to a horror film.

"The scariest movies, from Jaws to John Carpenter's The Thing, or The Grudge and The Ring, the boogeyman doesn't talk," McFarlane said. "It confuses people because of the comic book industry, and because they all default into their Captain America mindset, and I keep saying, no, get into John Carpenter's mindset or Hitchcock. 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?"