Quoth Todd McFarlane, "I can make a spooky, suspenseful thriller that will scare the crap out of you." If it has to do with plunking down hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase Mark McGwire’s and Sammy Sosa’s now valueless home run balls, I’ll bet you can, sir. But if it’s a self-financed Spawn 2 you’re talking about, Todd, then you’d better check your calendar.
Ten years ago, anything remotely resembling a superhero movie was sufficient to whip fanboys into a frenzy; we were so desperate for Spider-Man or a new Superman movie (even with Tim Burton directing Nicolas Cage as the Man of Steel and Chris Rock as Jimmy Olsen), that we’d eat a shit sandwich like Spawn and swear it almost tasted like McDonalds cheeseburger fished out of a dumpster. Now that we’ve had our superhero itch scratched raw, I can’t imagine anything less appealing than revisiting a character so seemingly embedded in the 1990s. Maybe McFarlane could drum up interest with Spawn pogs or a virtual reality arcade game that puts you in the action.
Whether McFarlane writes this as Spawn 2 or a franchise reboot, I doubt there’s a single studio willing to co-finance and/or distribute this movie – though I bet he could get the great Mark A.Z. Dippé to take another crack at the character (provided he isn’t too worn out from supervising the visual effects for D.B. Sweeney’s directorial debut, Dirt Nap). I believe there was marked improvement from Spawn to Halloweentown High to Frankenfish; go ahead and laugh, but Dippé might be on the verge of making this generation’s Hero and the Terror. It could happen.