Spawn was supposed to be the movie that turned the superhero genre on its head. The 1997 adaptation of the million-selling Todd McFarlane comic was gritty and pugnacious, with an anti-hero who had literally travelled to hell and back.  It exuded menace and irreverence, and, in martial arts star Michael Jai White, boasted the first ever African-American lead in a superhero film. Add an impressive support cast – including Martin Sheen at his most unhinged since Apocalypse Now – and the hotshot FX crew responsible for the T-Rex in Jurassic Park and success seemed preordained.  Nineteen years later, comic book fans are counting down to the similarly iconoclastic Deadpool, featuring Ryan Reynolds as a bad-boy crime-fighter likewise ill-inclined to play by the rules. Amid overwhelmingly approving early reviews, Hollywood tea-leaf readers predict a bumper opening weekend.  Yet Spawn serves as a lesson to anyone under the misapprehension that there is a sure thing in superhero movies – especially when a film consciously rejects the oeuvre's black and white morality. If Spawn is remembered at all it is as a low-point for Sheen, seemingly channelling son Charlie's glassy-eyed hamminess as tousled bad guy Jason Wynn. Even fans of the source material actively dislike it.  There are obvious lessons here for Deadpool which, as with Spawn before it, attempts to introduce a streak of self-awareness into this perpetually adolescent school of blockbuster. Spawn's stabs at humour, in particular, foreshadow Deadpool's tongue-in-cheek undertones. Yet it was exactly this element which provoked the strongest backlash.  Character actor John Leguizamo did his best as scatological villain Clown but despite an committed performance (the maggots he licked off a pizza retrieved from a dumpster were real), the body humour gags and creaking one-liners undermined the heroic thrust of the tale.  "It was as if they were intentionally making it goofy or light-hearted at times, and pulling their punches in order to achieve a more inclusive PG-13 rating," says Trent Claus, curator of the Spawnworld fan site. "By doing so, they sacrificed much of what made the comics so interesting."  Spawn isn't terrible. Watched today, it is clearly ill-deserving of its reputation as one of the pre-eminent caped turkeys of the Nineties. As with other avowedly nihilistic superhero movies of the era – gloomy bedfellows such as The Crow and Blade – it carries itself with a swagger absent in contemporary comic adaptations.  Spawn may suffer from a muddy plot and confusing action scenes, but the film emanates a drop-dead cool Captain America, Iron Man etc would trade their shiniest spandex for.  "Spawn looks badass," says Pete LePage, host of the Comic Book Club podcast. "And he is trying to fight the good fight even in hell. He's a tragic hero."  With his flapping, quasi-sentient red cape, anger management issues and complicated romantic life, Spawn felt like a grab-bag of comic book cliches. In essence, that is what he was. McFarlane conceived of the character in 1992, after he and several other artists working at Marvel had quit en masse, feeling they were not receiving the recognition (and recompense) that was their due. They would go on to establish Image Comics – a scrappy upstart today best known for bringing the world The Walking Dead.  The only way to make real money in this business, the ambitious and combative McFarlane had concluded, was to create your own superheroes from scratch. At Marvel he'd fought a running battle over his insistence on drawing Spider-Man with large, Manga-style eyes and was largely responsible for the look of the instantly iconic Venom. Now, requiring a protagonist who would chime with the despondent tone of Nineties comics, he came up with Spawn: a servitor of hell trying to reconnect with the good man (army assassin Al Simmons) he used to be.  "I always said in his simplest form Spawn was sort of the Batman without corporate America," McFarlane later commented. "I was able to quickly establish that he could do things that the mainstream characters couldn’t and one of them, in its simplest form was that he could kill somebody, that’s not what the typical good guy would be doing."  A movie adaptation was on his to-do list from the outset. When budget wrangling threatened to derail the project, the enterprising McFarlane agreed to license the IP to New Line studios for a comparatively puny $1 million, in exchange for a guarantee of substantial creative output – and all associated merchandising rights. (McFarlane has gone on to establish a lucrative model and collectibles empire though his McFarlane's Toys brand.)  With White seeing off Cuba Gooding Jr, Wesley Snipes and, intriguingly, Snoop Dogg, for the lead and former Industrial Light and Magic animator Mark Dippé installed as director. the shoot was relatively uneventful. That despite a ballooning budget and special effects headaches that meant set-pieces were being worked on two weeks before release. More problematic was securing a crucial M-13 rating in the United States. Spawn had initially been slapped with an "R" designation, potentially fatal to its box office prospects.  "The MPAA would never tell us what scene or aspect of the film was too violent or extreme,'' producer Clint Goldman complained to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1997. "They simply said that the overall movie merits an "R" rating. Therefore, as filmmakers, we had to decide what limitations to impose on our movie. And one of those limitations was not to say "hell". That's just the way it is; you can't fight city hall.''  After the necessary compromises were implemented, Spawn received that highly-sought M-13 designation and initially appeared to have the makings of a hit, debuting at number two at the US box office behind Harrison Ford's Air Force One. Alas, reviews were uniformly dismissive and, with time, the critical panning soured our recollections of the film. Spawn earned its money back and then some, eventually taking in $87 million on a $45 million budget. Artistically, however, it came to be regarded as a disaster.  Indeed,when McFarlane floated the possibility of a reboot recently, he was at pains to distance the franchise from the 1997 release. The new version would be light on FX, with a focus on the spiritual angst of Spawn rather than his conflict with the hordes of hell. "It's not going to be a giant budget with a lot of special effects, it's going to be more of a horror movie and a thriller movie, not a superhero one," he said.  Yet defenders of the original Spawn believe it deserves a second chance, arguing traces of its DNA can be discerned in darker superhero movies to this day. Deadpool, in particular, stands on the earlier feature's shoulders.  "Spawn was ahead of its time in terms of showing comics adapted for the screen that weren't specifically aimed at children," says Spawnworld's Claude Trent. "As the main character comes from hell, he was a far cry from the purely-good characters with whom the general public was more familiar with, such as Superman or Spider-Man.  "As I remember, I was startled to see the hero killed in the first chapter," says the author of the official Spawn tie-in novel, Rob MacGregor, referring to the death of Al Simmons, who is resurrected as the vengeful Spawn. "I knew it was going to be a strange story, and I hoped I could make sense of it. It turned out okay – I thought it was a pretty good movie, too.  In hindsight there's a case that Spawn showed superhero properties could veer off the beaten track yet still hold their own commercially. It may have underwhelmed as a film but, in turning a profit, confirmed comics adaptations were capable of going dark and finding an audience. Granted, the truth of this had already been demonstrated by 1994's The Crow, in which Brandon Lee played an undead vigilante. But in earning nearly twice as much as its spiritual predecessor, Spawn represented success on a far grander scale.  "Along with The Crow, three years prior, and Blade, one year later, Spawn helped usher in the current trend of superhero movies, and they also showed that darker themes and issues could be addressed while still performing well at the box office," says Trent. "Not only that, but they proved films could be successfully adapted from smaller, less known characters and still be accepted by the audience."  What it and other self-consciously gloomy Nineties comic book movies begat, Deadpool arguably carries to fruition. The difference is that now the cinema-going public is open to a superhero property that dares to be something other than straightforwardly gallant and high-flown.
In 1997, the world wasn't ready for a violent, wise-cracking, grown-up superhero movie. Can Deadpool break the curse of Spawn?