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You had to be there when Spawn first hit shelves. In 1992, the comic by Todd McFarlane was the flagship for then-upstart publisher Image Comics and quickly became one of the most successful independent comic books of all time.
Since 2015, McFarlane has tried to resurrect Spawn as a movie franchise. But will the movie, tentatively titled King Spawn, actually see the light of day? Or will it stay doomed to dwell in development hell forever?
Here’s everything we know about the long-gestating Spawn reboot.
Wait, What Is Spawn?
Spawn is the brainchild of comic book giant Todd McFarlane. It centers on Al Simmons, a decorated CIA agent who, upon his death, makes a deal with a demon to return to Earth so that he may see his wife again. But Al’s Faustian bargain turns him into a Hellspawn, a superpowered yet hideously scarred avatar of the underworld. Now going by “Spawn,” Al has spent 300-plus issues fighting the never-ending war between heaven and hell on Earth.
Spawn was first imagined by McFarlane when he was a teenager growing up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The comic came to life after McFarlane co-founded Image Comics with other Marvel expats like Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, and Erik Larson.
McFarlane and the others originally strove to create a publisher where artists didn’t sacrifice the creative rights to their work, which was and is still standard practice at Marvel and DC. Over the decades, Image’s big-ticket titles like The Walking Dead, Invincible, Kick-A**, Monstress, Radiant Black, Saga, and more have been major hits that sometimes become centerpieces to their own media empires. Spawn was just the first in a long line of success for the upstart publisher.
In 1997, just before superheroes became a Hollywood goldmine, a live-action Spawn film hit theaters with Michael Jai White in the lead role. Though it was a box-office hit, poor reviews damned the would-be franchise. Ever since, McFarlane has tried to make Spawn as big of a deal on the big screen as he is in comics.
So, What’s This New Spawn Movie?
Since 2015, McFarlane has publicly discussed his efforts to reboot Spawn for the big screen. To break down the entire timeline in detail is frankly exhausting. But the basic gist is that McFarlane wrote a script with the intention to direct it himself. By 2017, McFarlane had partnered with Blumhouse to produce the movie, and in 2018, actor Jamie Foxx signed on to star in the title role. Jeremy Renner also came aboard as one of the comics’ supporting characters, a city cop named Twitch.
Now, the project has been rewritten with a new script and is actively seeking a director.
In interviews and in his own social media streams, McFarlane has described his vision for Spawn as a grounded R-rated horror movie, with Spawn behaving like the shark in Jaws, as he put it to ComicBook.com in 2017. “In the background, there’s this thing moving around, this boogeyman. That boogeyman just happens to be something that you and I, intellectually, know is Spawn,” McFarlane said.
In a separate interview for ComicBook.com, also from 2017, McFarlane elaborated on his vision: “I’m not going for the same crowd that Marvel and DC is going for; I’m going for the same crowd that horror film releases going for. People who want to take their boyfriend or girlfriend or go out with the girls and go to the movies and get spooked.”
McFarlane also told Vulture that year: “It’s impossible for me to believe that anyone will go to this movie and think it’s a superhero movie if they watch the trailer once ... It will say, without using bold words, ‘This is not a superhero movie. Period.’ If you think it is, don’t go. Because it won’t act, talk, feel like any of it. What it will act and talk and feel like are creepy little low-budget movies that scare the s*** out of you.”
In July 2024, McFarlane said that the film’s new working title was King Spawn, though the movie is not an adaptation of the 2022 comic book series that bears the name.
“It’s probably just a working title,” McFarlane said, adding that it was merely a way to avoid assumptions audiences have about reboots. “I don’t know if that would be the final title or whatever. But it was just a way to separate it, to just at least for us internally. Just to say, ‘This is our version that is different from the one decades ago.’”
When Will Spawn Open in Theaters?
There isn’t a release date for Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. The movie has yet to start production. As recently as July 2025, McFarlane told ComicBook.com the project is still in motion at Blumhouse. At the time, the parties had contacted a director and reached out with a final offer. McFarlane did not disclose the name of the director, nor did he ever confirm if they signed on.
Said McFarlane:
“I’ve been talking about it for seven years and it just seems like there’s always an impediment that’s frustrating and I, to some extent, I know I’ve frustrated my wife. She’s like, ‘Stop talking about it, just make it,’ and I think it’s fair. I think the fans are the same way. What I will say is that we are still moving along. I went and met with a director, we want to sign them, they gave me the numbers last week, we’ve given it to them, hopefully, he signs on.”
McFarlane added that he will withhold updates until every piece of the production puzzle is locked in:
“I don’t think we’ll announce when he signs on. I think what we’ll do is we’ll announce when we have the script and we’ve got the buyer. Instead of doing what I’ve done before, every time we hire somebody, I announce it, is to just go, ‘It sold with this director, writer, these people attached as actors, boom, boom, boom, this is what we’re gonna make,’ that would be it ... But the contract went out, literally, last week. I’m here to tell you it’s an A[-list] director, from my perspective. I go, ‘Wow,’ we keep getting lucky with Spawn. The people who are excited about it are people that are in the top tier, from my perspective, so it’s like, ‘Wow. Okay, cool.’ So we’ll see.”
McFarlane told me himself at New York Comic Con 2022 that one of the biggest hurdles he’s faced is the Spawn IP itself. Though Spawn is influential in American comics, it doesn’t resonate abroad. “As much as I love [Spawn], it isn’t a household name in Hong Kong, in Barcelona, in the Czech Republic, in Poland,” he said. “I’m not the Spawn guy, I’m the guy who co-created Venom. That’s what will get moviegoers into theaters. That’s what’s gonna get them in there.”
He also told me: “Our goal is to make the best movie we can that will entertain the most people, and if that doesn’t keep every comic book collector happy, we have to turn a slight blind eye. We got to make a movie that works. A movie that works lets us make a second, a third, a fourth. This is how you build a franchise.”
