After a very long wait, all the pieces are finally falling into place for Todd McFarlane’s Spawn. He’s got a great cast, including Jamie Foxx as the supernatural anti-hero and Jeremy Renner as NYPD detective Twitch, an impressive behind the scenes crew including The Walking Dead‘s gore guru Greg Nicotero and a novel script with an interesting angle on the supernatural antihero. Despite all this, it’s never gone into production, with McFarlane unable to convince a studio to officially greenlight the film.

But now it looks like things are going ahead, thanks to Spawn’s Mortal Kombat 11 teammate, the Clown Prince of Crime. Yes, we recently heard that Joker‘s wild critical and commercial success had encouraged studios to invest in R-rated, dark comic book movies, resulting in Spawn getting the go ahead. McFarlane says that it’ll film this year, and a further indication that they’re gearing up for full production comes from some interesting casting news we’ve heard today.

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According to sources close to WGTC – the same ones who said Han would return to the Fast & Furious franchise and that Aladdin 2 was in development, both of which turned out to be true – Josh Gad, or Josh Gad-type actors, if they can’t get him, are being eyed to play the Violator. For those unfamiliar, the character is one of Spawn’s most famous antagonists. We’ve seen him on screen before, of course, in the 1997 movie, with John Leguizamo playing the rotund clown version and some of the worst CGI ever playing the demonic monster version. Presumably, Gad, best known for portraying the goofy comedy sidekick snowman character in the Frozen movies, is being considered for the evil clown variant.

But though the pieces seem to be falling into place for Spawn, I won’t truly believe it’s happening until the cameras start rolling. Even then I won’t entirely rest easy until the film is approaching its release date. But if this does come to fruition – and if it’s as good a movie as it sounds – then Todd McFarlane deserves a huge amount of credit for his dedication and persistence in getting it made.