Admittedly, having not followed comic book news all that closely in my life and still being relatively new to even the film industry, my familiarity with Todd McFarlane’s long-running penchant for bullshit is still vague at best. I know he’s talked about a new Spawn film and an upcoming animated series routinely for going on a decade, and I know his Mark Millar-like habit of inflating prospects and exaggerating timelines is pretty much a given.

So with all that in mind, prepare your grains of salt, because McFarlane has some updates…

“I continue writing pages here and there. I have a guy waiting in the sidelines, an Academy Award-winning actor. Every three weeks he’s on the phone going, ‘Todd, where’s the script? Todd, where’s the script?’ I can’t say who it is… The pitch I gave was that we could do ten of these for the next ten years and he wouldn’t have to be 22 for the rest of his life.”

So to recap, a mysterious Oscar-winner wants to follow in Michael Jai White’s footsteps for a McFarlane-scripted reboot of the hell-tortured sorta-superhero who graced screens in 1997. He can’t tell us who, and he’s working at the pace of a couple pages a day whenever he happens to feel like it. McFarlane also notes that if the movie happens, they’ll be able to follow it up with a new animated series that’s already developed, recorded, and ready to go.

“We have 90 minutes all set and ready to go, other than sending it to an animation house. We’ve done all the voice recordings, we’ve done all the backgrounds, so the technology is way better than it was a decade ago; there are some spectacular things we can do now that we weren’t able to when we were on HBO.”

And now my duty is done, bringing McFarlane’s promises to your eyes, and making sure there’s a piece here that I can link to in 2016 ,the next time he tosses out a promise at a toy convention.

Here’s the horse’s mouth actually forming the words to MTV (via CBM):