Comic legend Todd McFarlane believes his new version of Spawn will be the next “Joker.” Is he right?
Genre: Superhero
Premise: When a cop’s daughter disappears, he moves into a low-income apartment building that houses a strange being who wants to help him get revenge.
About: Spawn creator Todd McFarlane has adopted the mantra, “If nobody else is going to do it, do it your darned self.” McFarlane is moving out of his comic book comfort zone to both write AND direct a new version of Spawn (side note: McFarlane has never directed before). McFarlane believes that the key to Spawn working is an R-rating. And after the success of Joker, everyone agreed with him. He’s since brought on powerhouse production company, Blumhouse. And now it’s a matter of navigating Covid for a production start date. Spawn will star Jamie Foxx (as Spawn) and Jeremy Renner.
Writer: Todd McFarlane (based on his own comic)
Details: 116 pages
What if I told you I just read a script I’d characterize as The Equalizer meets Taken meets The Joker? Would that get you interested? It got me interested.
Funny enough, this Spawn script got lost in my hard drive for months because whenever someone mentioned a “new Spawn movie,” I upchucked on the memory of that 1997 abomination that starred John Leguizano. If I remember correctly, Spawn’s super power in that movie was farting? Or wait. That was the villain’s superpower. Played by John Leguizano?
Oh who cares. The quicker we can erase that movie from our data banks, the better. And that’s exactly what McFarlane set out to do with this script.
Police officer Max “Twitch” Williams has the perfect life. He’s got a wonderful wife, Kate, and a beautiful young daughter, Lauren. But Twitch has a flaw. He’s a workaholic. As much as he hates to admit it, work always comes first. And that’s going to haunt him for the rest of his life. Because one day when he’s supposed to be picking up his daughter, he’s out on one last call. Without him there, someone kidnaps and kills his daughter.
Cut to four months later and Twitch is just now coming back to work. He’s embroiled in an ugly divorce with his wife and the lawyers are bleeding him dry. Twitch is expected to come back and be a cop again but everyone knows what Twitch is really going to do – he’s going to look for who killed his daughter.
Twitch’s partner, Danny, begs Twitch not to look into it. They have an entire investigative team trying to solve the case. Any interference from Twitch could get them in trouble. But come on. Like Twitch really isn’t going to look? He has his sights set on the evil local crime boss, Jeremy Dillon. Dillon has always hated Twitch because Twitch is the one cop he can’t control. Which is exactly why Twitch thinks Dillon had something to do with Lauren’s death.
Meanwhile, Twitch moves into a low-income housing building and befriends many of the low-lifes there. These are people who have either given up on life or are about to. One of those tenants is the reclusive and mysterious Al who lives upstairs on the fifth floor. What Twitch doesn’t know yet is that Al is a unique type of superhero. One determined to rid the world of evil. He wants to start with the people who killed Lauren. This is how their one-of-a-kind friendship begins.
The biggest surprise in this script is that it’s a straight up no-holds-barred character piece. I was expecting something with big vapid Marvel set pieces. As each new scene arrived, I asked myself, “Where’s the crazy car chase?” “Where’s the fight scene on a nose-diving airplane?” “Why doesn’t anyone have heat-vision?”
Instead, the story was slow. The plot was methodical. And I felt myself getting impatient.
But then a strange thing happened. I recognized that the script was, indeed, a character piece. And that the central pillars of that examination were in place: We like the hero and want to see him succeed. We dislike the villain and want to see him go down.
As long as you have these two things in place, your screenplay *should* work. In fact, the degrees to which you can make us like the hero and hate the villain define just how much we enjoy something. I wouldn’t say that Spawn is all the way up there in great territory. But it’s pretty darn good.
What caught my attention was that instead of using Lauren’s death solely as a plot motivator (a plot motivator is when you have something happen to give the hero a goal – in this case, avenge the death of his daughter), McFarlane had Twitch really sit in that pain. Twitch is trying to get his life going again (remember our tip from yesterday – if your hero falls down, make sure they get back up and keep trying). But he’s tortured by the loss. We see how it affects him in everything he does – from trying to make new friends in the apartment complex to demanding his precinct do more to find the killer.
Why does fighting the pain matter? Why must it always be present? Why must it always torture him?
Well, one of the things that separates great writers from good writers is great writers understand the reality of a situation and embrace it. As opposed to use it as a means to move their plot along. You’d think in some of the amateur screenplays I read that people can conquer grief in 48 hours. Lose a daughter? No problem. A quick montage of them getting wasted on whisky and a single uplifting talk with a neighbor and they’re ready to go again!
Obviously, every movie is different and you have to work within the parameters of your genre (you don’t have a lot of time to mourn death in action-adventure movies) but when you’re writing character pieces, you better treat death and loss like a real thing. Because if your characters aren’t that broken up about it? Why should we be?
What I also liked about Spawn was that it used one of my favorite structural approaches. One goal. One mystery. The goal is to get revenge. The mystery is, who is Spawn? Who is this guy who keeps showing up in the shadows and helping Twitch? The reason this dual-structure works should be obvious. Why give the reader one reason to keep reading when you can give them two? Imagine this movie without the mystery narrative. It’s just another “cop looking for revenge” movie. Not as intriguing, right?
Maybe the strangest thing about this script is Spawn himself. I confess that I thought Twitch was going to turn into Spawn. I didn’t know Spawn was his own entity. And, to that end, he’s unlike any superhero we’ve seen before. There’s something… picky… about the way he deals with each situation. Sometimes he goes all in. Other times he waits in the shadows, allowing Twitch to deal with it.
I love characters you can’t predict. The second I can consistently predict what a character is going to do is the moment I lose interest in a story. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Spawn would do next. When he would appear. What his plan was. If he was even real. In one of the cooler twists in the script, Al’s apartment simply disappears from the building. Twitch goes to the landlord and asks where Al went. The landlord’s never heard of Al. “He lives on the fifth floor,” Twitch demands. “Fifth floor?” The landlord replies. “We don’t have a fifth floor.” Twitch runs outside to see that, sure enough, his building only has four floors. Is Spawn even real??? Talk about a mystery box.
(Ending spoiler) The script has a great finale involving Spawn trapping all the bad guys in the building and slaughtering them all. Would it surprise you that this is the only set piece in the script!? That’s it! Everything else is a straight-forward investigative cop drama.
And yet I can say, with certainty, that this version of the story is better than any big budget superhero version they could’ve come up with. Which goes to show just how important focusing on character development and character relationships is. We all assume it’s the crazy wild set pieces that hook’em when it’s the opposite. Get the character stuff right and you’ve got us. It proved true yesterday with The Queen’s Gambit. And it proved true today with Spawn.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Grab some extra mileage out of your betrayals. In a lot of these cop movies, there is a major betrayal. Usually, someone close to the hero turns out to be working for the other side. What most writers do is they reveal that betrayal to both the hero and the audience at the same time. BEST FRIEND NICK IS WORKING WITH THE VILLAIN! WOWZERS! There’s another, some would say more effective, way to do this, however. 20-30 pages before you reveal to your hero that the friend is working with the bad guy, reveal TO THE AUDIENCE the friend is working with the bad guy. This creates a scenario of dramatic irony for the next 30 pages as we know that the best friend is screwing over our hero but the hero does not. (Spoiler) That’s exactly what they do here. We’re told after the mid-point that Danny (Twitch’s partner) is working with Dillon. Only later, in the third act, is this information revealed to Twitch.
