The Spawn movie is a perfect example of the studio executives getting themselves involved and ruining a project.
A friend of my family quit his Special Effects job at ILM to start up a production company with his buddy. This is the guy who convinced Spielberg CG was the way to go on Jurassic Park. He hated his job adding motion blur to the stop motion dinosaur footage and tried to talk his supervisor into just doing CGI dinosaurs. When he was told that couldn't be done he modelled a T-Rex skeleton and had it playing on a looping walk cycle the next time Spielberg was around. He also animated the T-1000 in T2, and the water alien the Abyss, and a bunch of other stuff. The last thing he did with ILM was the Star Wars special editions.
Anyway, I bring this up because: the project his buddy had in mind? A gritty, R-rated, true to the source material version of a little comic called "Spawn". Change after change after change was forced upon them by the studio, and that awful movie was the result. It basically boiled down to:
"Take out all this character development. Teenagers want boobs and explosions. Add in more explosions!"
"Okay, can we at least get more funding for the SFX department to do that?"
"HAHAHAHAHA... Oh, you're serious. No."
Steve knows even the special effects weren't that great, which I think bugs him, but he takes solace in the Violator, because that was all him. He wouldn't let anyone else touch it.
He directs commercials now (Actually I haven't spoken to him in a few years; I think he may be teaching now). His last foray into film was directing "The Wild" for Disney, which he only did because they agreed to fund a MASSIVE upgrade and expansion of a Canadian animation studio if he would do it.
Edit: Holy crap I just found an hour long documentary on him. I've linked it now.