One of the most beloved comic book characters of the early 1990s, Spawn single-handedly propelled Image Comics into the mainstream. Now, three decades later, the character continues to resonate with new generations of fans and is held in the same esteem as the best that Marvel and DC have to offer.

The initial popularity of Spawn led to a feature film adaptation in 1997. While modestly successful at the box office, the film was all but dismissed by fans and critics. A new Spawn film has lingered in various stages of development hell for the better part of a decade, though it recently made headlines due to the hiring of writers Scott Silver (Joker) and Malcolm Spellman (Captain America: New World Order), as well as director Matt Mixon. With Jamie Foxx still onboard to star as the titular demonic avenger, it seems the long-awaited Spawn reboot is closer than ever to becoming a cinematic reality.

Related: Spawn Could've Been A Great Superhero Movie (If It Was R-Rated)

At NYCC 2022, Screen Rant caught up with creator Todd McFarlane, who sat down to discuss his legacy as an entertainer and businessman, as well as to share his thoughts on the long-gestating Spawn reboot film. McFarlane talks about why it’s taken so long and how producer Jason Blum assured him that “every movie gets made when the time is right.” He also discusses his approach to business; since McFarlane Toys is not a publicly traded company, his only obligation is to himself, not to anonymous shareholders. Thus, he doesn’t need to compromise his art in order to enhance his bottom line.

Todd McFarlane Opens Up About Spawn

Spawn

Screen Rant: Your toy company isn't publicly traded. You're one of the few big business guys left who's also an artist. The way I see it, you're so beloved because you put the art in front of the profit. Do you pride yourself on that, or is it just easier to be beholden to yourself than to shareholders?

Todd McFarlane: I'm not saying that what's good for me is good for anybody else. I'm just saying... People ask me, and I think we've all asked it, "when is enough enough?" For some people, there's no answer. There's never enough. For my wife and I, and our family, we, long ago, got past 'enough.' Once you say, 'we're living a comfortable life,' you don't want things like a diamond-studded Rolls Royce car, which would mean having to do other things to make that kind of money, to buy something silly. If you don't have the need to spend money, then money doesn't become the driving force. You look at other things. I look at delivering quality product, at a fair price, to the consumer.

What a radical concept!

Todd McFarlane: As odd as it is, if you do that, the byproduct is money! You get money anyway! You're not even trying for it, but if you treat people fair, they respond in kind, and the money is there. Instead of worrying about money to start with, worry about making the best product you can, and worry about being as loyal to the consumers as they are to you. The rest of it will take care of itself.

You can't quantify that on a spreadsheet in advance, which is what public companies have to do. They have to go a different way. They're obligated by law. The executives have what is called a feduciary responsibility. They're just doing their job. I'm not saying it's right or wrong or good or bad. It's just their job. But I don't have to follow the same set of rules. I can try different things. I've learned there's enough of a hunger and an audience. With my overhead, I don't have to sell tens of millions of units for every line like the big guys do. I don't have the same overhead!

On a pure business level, you can make 100 million dollars and not be profitable if your overhead is 110 million. Or, if you make one million dollars, you can be profitable if your overhead is less than one million. So it doesn't matter how much money you make. What matters is your structure. I have a small, simple, uncomplicated business structure, I don't need to sell a ton of toys to say, "Wow, it was a good year, let's do it again!" It's a personal philosophy. It's not for everybody.

Animated Spawn

Independent spirit! You're a pioneer of the creator-owned comic. And Spawn, that's still entirely yours, right?

Todd McFarlane: Right. Well, there's two things. One, I need to be successful enough so that I can keep doing what I'm doing. I'm not going to apologize for being successful at anything we do. You have to have a certain level of success so that, if you walk into a room and you are going to ask somebody else to join you, they're going to want to tag up with people who've shown they can be successful. I need success so I can do more art on another day in certain fields.

Two, I also need to be successful enough so that I can be an example to creative people who have ideas. Budding entrepreneurs will say, "Maybe I can do it too, since there's that little punk, Todd, and he wasn't very good. He wasn't very smart. But he was somehow able to navigate through the world of art and business, and not only lived to tell about it, but at times, actually shined." So maybe it's doable, because I'm a living example.

And there's other people who are great examples, like Robert Kirkman, with The Walking Dead. You can do it! How do I know? Because we're living it. I don't think Robert Kirkman or myself would consider ourselves to be unique on any level. We're just guys who wanted to control our destiny in as many corners as possible. Sometimes we joined with others, and we had to make compromises to get there. But all those decisions are still ultimately at our feet. And we have to make those decisions, good, bad, or not.

Win, lose, or draw.

Todd McFarlane: That's it! Guys, you don't have to do 300 issues. But if you want to do that many, it's doable. You can make a living. Your character can be strong. How do I know? Because there's a dude named Todd who did Spawn.

Scary Spawn

You don't have to call yourself unique, but there are a lot of people who've been waiting years and years for that Spawn movie. They'll call you unique, and I will call you unique. Speaking of the movie, I heard there was some news about that. Who did you hire and why did you hire them?

Todd McFarlane: In this community that I live in, I've been telling them that I'm going to get Spawn: The Movie done. I'm going to get it done. I want it to be super cool and badass. The original plan was for me to write, produce, and direct. Keep it low budget, get in, do it, get out. But I've been asking some pretty high level talent to come on board, and some of them have said "yes." A-list people in Hollywood have gone, "Okay, sure." We keep building that team to become stronger and stronger.

I have to let people who've made careers for themselves, and studios that are going to invest their own money, in. All of them are going to want to do things that they know will be right for this movie. I don't want to be that guy who comes in and is an auteur and says, "No, it must be my way or it's wrong!" I don't want to be that guy. I want to be a team player. My goal for the movie is to make the best movie we can. How do we do that? We hire talent! Some of our talent has been around for a while, but then the pandemic came and that caused some wrinkles.

Yeah, everything got put on hold.

Todd McFarlane: The real news is that we've landed a deal, and we're making a movie. That's what people should care about. But I felt like we should make one more announcement. I keep saying we have momentum, and we've been working on it during the pandemic, but those might be hollow words after a while. I need to make it more than me saying, "trust me!"

Words have an expiration date until the cameras start rolling, and even after.

Todd McFarlane: Trust does have an expiration date! I went to the guys and said, "I have to tell them about some of you guys that have been hanging around, because I think you help legitimize the reality of what we're trying to do." Why would talented people with careers and want to keep their momentum going, why would they want to hitch themselves to the Spawn train? Unless everybody felt it was heading in the direction we want, which is that it's going to be made, and it's going to be successful.

Yesterday, we announced some names. People know the names of people in front of the camera, but they might not know the names of people behind the camera, starting with the director on down. I think most people can only name two or three directors. But when you tell people about their accomplishments?

Number one, we got Scott Silver, a writer. People might not be aware of his name. But then you say, "He's the guy who co-wrote Joker." They're like, "Woah, woah, what did you say?" Yeah, we got the Joker writer. "Wow!" Right? I want the fans to react like that, to say, "I've seen Joker! I like the Joker!" By the way, Joker was the highest-grossing R-rated movie in cinematic history!

Spawn Todd McFarlane

Yeah, that worldwide box office was insane, more than a billion dollars!

Todd McFarlane: I've got Scott. He did a great job on Joker, and some other great movies like 8 Mile and The Fighter. To me, he's shown that he can write people, which is huge to me. He can write drama, and he can write jeopardy, and he does it over and over again.

The other person we announced was Malcolm Spellman, who's done some terrific stuff. Recently, the TV shows Empire and Bel-Air. Those are drama shows! Those are about people. I'm way more jealous about writers who can write people, and can move them in and out of scenes, than I am of explosions and car chases. I think that's low-hanging fruit.

It's easy to end a dispute by beating the s--t out of each other!

Todd McFarlane: Or blowing something up! Give me a big enough budget, and my mom can blow stuff up and make a movie. But what my mom can't do, and what I can't do, is write compelling characters. Both Scott and Malcolm have a proven track record that proves they can do it over and over again. Oh, and Malcolm did Falcon & the Winter Soldier. During the pandemic, when people were aching for some good superhero stuff, he comes up with that, and he's currently writing Captain America 4. So we've got the Captain America writer and the Joker writer!

Bridging the divide!

Todd McFarlane: Not bad! They've got the geek cred, so the fandom will love them. They have Hollywood cred, too, since they've been up for awards and done great stuff. And we augment it with one more guy, Matt Mixon, a young man with a good voice that I think has value that we need in this movie. They're gonna go and do their thing. I've heard all their ideas.

My job isn't to say, "Hey, this is how the movie should be!" That's not my job. My job is to help hire them and give them the confidence and trust they are warranted by their track record! I go, "If you have any questions about Spawn, I'm here to answer any and all of them." And they've been peppering me with questions. It doesn't mean they're gonna use any of what I say, and they're gonna go and make a movie.

Here's the thing: for us to have a successful movie, and success to me is global. If you have a globally successful movie, you can do part 2, and part 3, and 4... You get a franchise. We all want to start that. How do we do that? We just have to deliver what we believe is the best movie possible. Not a direct, line-by-line adaptation of the comic. And I'd argue some of that's already been done in the first movie, 20 years ago.

There's gonna be people in Poland and Korea and Australia and all these places who've never bought a single copy of Spawn. How are we going to get them to go to Spawn? I think there's a few ways. At the beginning of the trailer, we say, "From the writer of Joker, and the writer of Captain America, and the producer of Get Out, and the co-creator of Venom." People will go, "Ooh, I've seen all of those!" And if you put that at the beginning of one hell of a trailer, someone sitting in Belarus will go, "I've seen a couple of those movies and I like them, and they're doing Spawn? Hmm."

You don't have to already be a fan. You don't have to have bought a comic book or a toy of it. I'm hoping that, after 30 years, the name "Spawn" isn't 100% foreign to people who have never bought it. I've never bought a Kardashian thing, but I know they exist. I'm hoping there's some residual acknowledgment from being a brand for 30 years, whether you bought anything or not. And then, those who have supported it, they'll already have a keen interest. They'll be curious to see if it's as cool as everybody hopes.

Spawn 1997 Movie

They're fickle, but they'll give it a shot.

Todd McFarlane: Do a word cloud of Spawn, and I think the biggest words are "Badass," "Dark," and "Cool." Right? If you make something like that, I don't care how we get there. I don't care if it's loyal or not loyal to anything that pre-exists. Just keep those words intact. I'm sure the visuals will have enough there that will be Spawn. Let's just go from there! Let's try to entertain people for two hours. Let's not worry about whether it's a direct adaptation of issue #65 in the mythos. That's not important to me.

You ushered in a whole era of comics.

Todd McFarlane: Through Image Comics. As a group, not me.

Many of those characters and others inspired by them in the early 90s continue to be relevant today, but a lot of them faded away. But Spawn is evergreen. You can do anything with him. Put him in space, people love him. Give him a cowboy hat, people still love him. What is his secret? Is it just being cool?

Todd McFarlane: Being cool, being badass, and being around for 30 years. Attrition matters. Time matters. You come up with an idea, and you pound it over and over and over again. Why do we know Charmin toilet paper? There's a lot of other toilet paper out there. But they've been around and they get in your face with the commercial. They'll never let you forget that there's a brand of toilet paper called Charmin. Everything is about reminding people that you exist, even if others are doing the exact same thing.

At a certain point, people are comfortable with brands they grew up with, recognize, or know, over something else. That's why people buy so many Marvel and DC comics. They know Spider-Man and Superman and Batman. Those are names they grew up with. When they're 15, their first comics are going to be of characters they knew about before they started collecting. They're not going to go to the comic shop and start with something completely brand new to them. Spawn's been around for 30 years. There's an entire generation that's lived on this planet that's never been without Spawn. And you can use that!

The people who were there 30 years ago, they're grown up and they have kids. And now they're sharing some of the stuff they collected. A lot of it is still Spider-Man and Superman, but I'm hoping that some of them also give Spawn to their kids. I hear it more and more, kids going, "Yeah, my dad said Spawn was his favorite, he said it was cool, so now I'm reading it." Good! I've been around long enough, now, that we've got the next wave. The next wave, we'll see if we can make Spawn as cool to them as it was to us in the 1990s.

Spawn Comic

I'm thinking about his design, too. So many characters get redesigned over and over again, to the point where they look like completely different people. Now, maybe you'll correct me, but to my knowledge, Spawn has always been a visual variation on a common theme, as opposed to something that gets reinvented. There's no Spawn 2.0. He's always recognizable.

Todd McFarlane: We do have iterations on him. But for the most part, whatever those changes are, he's still instantly recognizable as Spawn. He used to have a little more red in his costume. I made it more black. He has a different amount of spikes no from when he did back then. [Laughs] But you still go, "Oh, that's him."

If I show you new-school Spawn or old-school Spawn, my wife doesn't even notice the difference. It's all the same. Look, at some point, the answers are already staring you in the face. Superman still kinda looks like Superman, and Batman still looks like Batman, and Spider-Man still looks like Spidey.

Spider-Man especially, yeah.

Todd McFarlane: It works for them. If it's worked for them for decades and decades, why would I sit there and do it a different way? Even when I first designed Spawn, when I was a sixteen-year-old kid. If you look at his costume, especially the original drawing I did, it's not an accident. He has a cape. Why? Superheroes have capes. Gloves. Why? Superheroes have gloves. He's got that big 'M' mark on his chest. Why? Well, Spider-Man's got a spider, Superman's got an S, and Batman's got a bat. Like, of course you have something on the chest! They've all got something on the chest!

And he wears a mask. They all wear masks if they have a secret identity. The design was really influenced by 1950s superhero designs. By the time it got to 1992 and I released the first issue, I knew I needed to modernize him somewhat, but the basics are still there. I kept the cape, the gloves, the mask, and whatever else... But I thought, I'd better give him some chains and some spikes, and some skulls. I'd better make him nasty! But the drawing I made when I was sixteen, based on the 1950s style, it's still there at its core. It worked for those guys, why shouldn't it work on my guy! And I guess it's done okay.

The movie's been so long in development, but that first movie has seen something of a resurgence in popularity and nostalgia. Is that a word that makes you cringe, "nostalgia?" Or are you for it?

Todd McFarlane: Here's the thing about art. Every artist always wants to take their work back, five minutes after they hand it in. You're never satisfied. There's no comic book, toy, or anything I've ever done, where I went, "That's perfect. I wouldn't change it if I had five more minutes." You would always change it. Would I do things differently with the first Spawn movie? Of course! But I've also grown old enough to know, at that moment, that was the best I could possibly do. It was the best our team could do. And that's what we did with the allotted time, effort, and money. We did it! The question is, will we do something better, worse, or neutral on the next movie? I dunno, I'll let individuals make that decision.

Our job is to make art and let other people have their opinion on it. and not worry about whether that particular thing was the greatest thing that you ever did. To me, your best work should always be in front of you. You should never go, "That thing I did ten years ago was the highlight of my life and I'm never gonna touch that ever again. It's all downhill from here." Why would you want that? I don't even know how that becomes inspirational. I think I've got 30 more years of doing the art. I have to believe that my best art is still in my future. You guys can write nice things about my past, and God bless you, but I wake up every day and worry about what's in front of me, not what's behind me.

Spawn in 1997 movie

The new Spawn movie is shaping up to be a bigger and bigger production. Do you ever think about going back, at some point, to the idea of making it yourself? Of writing, directing, editing, producing a $5 million Spawn movie where you call all the shots?

Todd McFarlane: Yes, every day! [Laughs] That's because my personality is just a control freak. I know, like I said earlier, that by adding more and A-list talent, I have to be realistic. Especially the CEO side of me. You can't expect these people to jump on board and invest time and money and their careers... I can't do that and insist that I direct. I wouldn't make that deal as a CEO myself!

I understand why Todd the artist wants to do that, but as a CEO, I'm not taking that deal. If I'm giving you money and my best people to make a team, and that team is going to be coached by someone who's never coached that sport before? Hmm, I don't know if I'm gonna go for that. Ted Lasso moments don't work out that often. I'll figure out how to scratch my itch of directing, writing, and producing. I'll get those done.

And I imagine you're pretty confident that Jason Blum isn't gonna force Spawn to have a talking cat or make it PG or make him white.

Todd McFarlane: Jason Blum has been very gracious. His enthusiasm for this property has been there every time. Jason said to me something that made me angry but might be the smartest thing he ever said. He said, "Todd, your movie will get made when it's ready. Every movie gets made when the time is right." I was like, "C'mon, let's make it! Let's make it! Let's make it now!" But if I had gotten my wish, there wouldn't be Scott Silver. There wouldn't be Malcolm Spellman. We wouldn't have Matt Mixon. We wouldn't have Jamie Foxx. I would have just made it the first three days, and we would have been out and it would have been a small movie. It would have been okay, hopefully kind of awesome, but not nearly as impressive as I think it's going to be with these pros around it.

Jason was right. Now that we've taken our time, the team has gotten bigger, stronger, and more formidable. We're going to get to our goal of making an international movie that is entertaining for a lot of people. We're gonna hand it to these real pros. They've been in the movie business. They know what they're doing. I have to have the confidence to let them do what they're good at. It's like if they wanted to do a comic book. They'd say, "Todd, we're going to lean on you." I made my bones in comics. They're the Hollywood people. If they want my input, I'll give it. If they have their own ideas, I'll cheerlead it. Our job is to make a good movie that's worth your $15 and two hours of time.

Check out our previous interview with Todd McFarlane and Greg Capullo about the recent Spawn/Batman crossover as well.

Next: The Dark Knight Has A Spawn Easter Egg You May Not Have Noticed