Jeremy Renner officially joins Jamie Foxx in Todd McFarlane’s Spawn

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

SPAWN comic book creator Todd McFarlane is set to make his feature directorial debut with a new cinematic adaptation of his creation, and he has just found the actor who will be playing the lead role in the film. That's not the title character, who will be played by Jamie Foxx. It's homicide detective Maximilian "Twitch" Williams III.

We heard a rumor last week that Jeremy Renner was up for the role, and now it has been officially confirmed: Renner will be playing Twitch in SPAWN.

McFarlane has been building up to making this movie for years, and during that time he has compared the roles of Twitch and Spawn in the story to Sheriff Brody and the shark in JAWS. Like Brody, Twitch will be carrying the film, while Spawn will show up at opportune times, like the shark.

In the comics, Spawn was

Al Simmons, a member of a CIA black ops team who is twice betrayed: after being set up by his cohorts to be murdered with his corpse set aflame, Simmons is then double crossed in Hell. He is convinced to become a Hellspawn warrior in exchange for being able to be reunited with his wife, only to find himself stuck in his demonic creature shell, and that his wife moved on and married his best friend. Spawn turns his rage on street scum and revenge. He realized long ago that he can’t battle the constant evil permeating the globe alone, and must enlist the aid of humans to help him fight the war. Detective ‘Twitch’ Williams has the intelligence and intuition that Spawn needs most. This unconventional detective is near fearless and compliments Spawn’s demonic powers, and it is that combination that will help Spawn win his war.

McFarlane will be producing the film alongside Blumhouse Productions. He had this to say about the project: 

With the ensemble of award-winning talent that has signed on to the Spawn Movie — Jason Blum (producer), Blumhouse Productions, Jamie Foxx (Spawn), and NOW Jeremy Renner — it is MORE than I'd EVER hoped for when first visualizing this movie years ago. As a first-time feature film director, I’m humbled by the level of talented people putting their trust into my film project."

SPAWN now needs to find a distributor to lock in the financing. The film will be rated R and is expected to have a budget in the range of 10 to 12 million. McFarlane said, 

Hopefully when we go to studios, fairly soon, we’ll get the interest of more than one and we can pick what place will do this project justice, marketing and distributing it. We’re going to go for as close to a green light as we can get, since the development process has already been done. We’re looking for someone to say, ‘yeah cool, we’ll take it.’ It’s a reasonable budget, we’re not asking anyone to stretch. The goal here is a quality project at reasonable price."

With the names McFarlane, Blumhouse, Foxx, Renner, and SPAWN attached, I don't think they're going to have any trouble securing the required budget.