Jamie Foxx is set to star in the film adaptation of the Spawn comics at Blumhouse Pictures.
Comics creator Todd McFarlane makes his directorial debut on an adaptation he scripted. Foxx will play Al Simmons, a member of a CIA black ops team who is betrayed twice. After being set up by his cohorts to be murdered with his corpse set aflame, he is double-crossed in Hell.
Convinced to become a Hellspawn warrior, in exchange for being able to be reunited with his wife, he finds himself stuck in a demonic creature shell and his wife having moved on and married his best friend.
So this is one pissed-off antihero who attends to dispatching the scum of the city in good and evil battles that encompass Earth, Heaven and Hell.
The budget is expected to be a very economical $10-12 million affair, allowing it to be a dark R-rated realization of McFarlane’s vision with Spawn himself only a supporting character – more akin to the shark in Jaws or the creature in The Thing. McFarlane cites Jacob’s Ladder as a big influence on the new take.