In the past, I had been pretty rough on Todd McFarlane, who has been talking up his Spawn remake for years now. Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, his art, and the toys he brought into the world, but at some point, he became the boy who cried wolf.

My sources had told me several times that McFarlane is unreasonable in many of his demands, refusing to allow anyone else to work on his screenplay and that many hurdles would need to be crossed before Spawn ever made it back to the big screen. Hollywood doesn’t work this way, although it’s hard not to respect the man’s determination to do things his way. It’s hard to imagine he’d ever get it his way, which means it was even more unlikely that Spawn would be reborn.

Then Blumhouse got involved. Not only do they have the brand, but they also have the first-look distribution deal with Universal. I figured, shit, with Blumhouse maybe, just maybe they’ll get him to allow another screenwriter to come in and fix up his screenplay. Then there were reports of a spring 2017 shoot, which were anything but confirmation that the film would actually go into production. When he landed commitments from Jamie Foxx and Jeremy Renner to star, that’s when I threw in the towel and admitted that Blumhouse was going to help McFarlane get this done.

Yet here we are, back at square one. Or at least it sounds that way.

Nearly two years after Blumhouse joining the project, McFarlane speaks to Comicbook.com about what it’s going to take to get it off the ground, and it all comes down to agreement on a script.

“Yep. About the same spot,” McFarlane said, providing a not-so-promising update on the long-gestating project. “The money’s sitting on the sidelines ready to go. I just need to get everyone that wants to put in money to shake their heads to the same script. As you can imagine, everyone has a slightly different version of it in their head. You just go and trying to appease a handful of people while not giving in to what it is that I’m trying to do myself.”

“Because if I have to change it too much, I’ll just walk away from it all.”

If you’ve been following my inside reporting over the years, this lines up completely. McFarlane continues to push against the system in hopes of getting his dream project made the way he wants to. Again, it’s admirable, but also not realistic.

Here’s where fans are going to lose their lunch. If this is being reported correctly, Blumhouse hasn’t even approached a studio yet as, two years later, there’s been no mutual agreement on the script. (Are you serious?)

“Here’s how it would work, is that let’s say even we had let’s say, three studios, right? Let’s just pick three,” McFarlane said. “So we got Sony. I’m gonna make it all up. Sony, Universal, Paramount, the ones that don’t have Marvel and DC. They should hopefully be more interested. Even if they all showed interest at the same time, our questions are gonna be, “Well, what kind of marketing campaign are you gonna do with it?” And then number two, “What are your slots that you have?” Right?”

“And so, some of them may say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this campaign, and we’ve got this slot,'” McFarlane said. “‘We think it would be better, but you have to wait another three, four, five months till we got the opening that we think is right.’ And somebody else might say, ‘Hey, we can go sooner than that, but maybe we’re not gonna pour as much into advertising.’ And we’ll just have to weigh those variables, and then go, ‘Which one do we think makes the most sense for the project’s success as a whole?'”

This is all nauseating, especially the part where McFarlane exclaims that he’ll just “walk away from it all” if he has ‘to change it too much.” As a fan, I want to see Spawn back in any way shape or form. With Netflix and Amazon in the world, I think McFarlane has a chance to get his vision on screen in full, but his words don’t sound too promising and I think we have to accept that the odds of this happening are getting pretty slim. In fact, my insider also told me that, in order for McFarlane to get what he wants, he’d have to concede some sort of rights to Spawn. Why the fuck would he do that?

What do you all think?