In a new interview with IGN, first-time director Todd McFarlane claims his forthcoming Spawn reboot will be so motherfucking dark, it will make your 10-year-old child cry in terror. Take that, hypothetical 10-year-old who's been dragged to see an R-rated movie based on Spawn. Betcha didn't see that coming.
Says McFarlane:
"There have been a couple of R-rated movies out there. They even teased us a little bit with Venom before they went to PG-13. But they're not going to go dark in my definition of dark or Jason Blum's definition of dark or Greg Nicotero of Walking Dead's definition of dark.
Their dark is here's PG-13, here's R, they go over a little bit. We're talking over here. We're talking that it would make your kids cry. If you're going to do dark R, make the children cry who are under 10. That's the movie. Do I think that The Joker is gonna make 10-year-olds cry? Nope. Would I make them cry? Sure, I would because I'd be doing a movie for adults."
Obviously, McFarlane's just trying to communicate how grisly this new version of Spawn's gonna be, and we can appreciate that. Building a case on crying children seems like maybe a bit much, but then again, we've not seen the designs Nicotero's made for this movie. He may well be right.
If nothing else, he certainly sounds passionate. Elsewhere in the same interview, McFarlane explains how Spawn will be kinda like Corin Hardy's The Nun:
"We just saw one a couple weeks ago called [The] Nun. It's called Nun She's Not Onscreen The Most and she really doesn't talk a whole heck of a lot, right? I mean, these kinds of movies have been done forever. I'm just saying that in a movie like Jaws, it's called Jaws but the shark isn't onscreen talking and whenever the Hollywood studios say, 'How can you not have the lead character not talk?,' you and I can stand here and come up with a hundred movies that have done this in the last twenty years. And you don't even have to go back the last twenty years because there's one two weeks ago called The Nun and The Nun did it, right?
"So get your Nun hat on. Get your Aliens hat on, get your John Carpenter's The Thing, get your Jaws hat on. The Grudge, The Ring, get that hat on [and] my script makes sense. You put Captain America, Hulk on? It reads funny."
I don't know how you can read any of this and not be excited for whatever McFarlane's cooking up here. This thing is either gonna be the weirdest superhero/horror hybrid we've ever seen or a complete and total disaster, and we're very curious to see how it all shakes out. Consider our tickets sold, Todd.
Stay tuned for more on Spawn as further updates become available. In the meantime, maybe sit your 10-year-old down and break the news gently to them.