Month: August 2024

From Brandon Lee to Bill Skarsgård, and almost…Mark Wahlberg?

It’s been 30 years in the making, but The Crow has finally been rebooted. Despite many, many challenges along the way, this was inevitable. 

In 1994, The Crow found roost in the hearts of movie fans, from goths clutching tattered copies of James O’Barr’s graphic novels and those who stumbled across the soundtrack’s bands on MTV late at night to action fans eager to see Bruce Lee’s only son, Brandon Lee, in what should have been his big-screen hurrah. Lee’s accidental death before the film was finished, caused by a prop gun shot during a crucial scene, only added to the tragic allure of the film and its rain-slick aesthetic.

Three sequels, with increasing levels of silliness, tried to gain momentum. (Iggy Pop shrieking, “Fuck you, bird dick!” during The Crow: City of Angels is a treasured college memory.) There was even a short-lived Canadian TV show, which seemed to be an urban fantasy hallucination along the lines of Ron Perlman’s Beauty and the Beast, but, like, worse. You couldn’t go to a goth club without seeing a guy wearing Eric Draven’s maquillage until well into the 21st century. Even with these sequels’ failings — ranging from from forgettable leading men and laughably bad storylines to exponentially dismal box office earnings — there was no way the powers that be wouldn’t keep trying to recapitalize upon the fervor over the original.

Now, the same year Alex Proyas’ original Crow celebrates its 30th anniversary, director Rupert Sanders resurrects Draven with a reboot. Bill Skarsgård headlines, donning haute JNCOs and scrubby facial tattoos to woo British musician FKA twigs, the two of them lovers on the run from Satan himself. They are Eric and Shelly for a neo-noir by way of Spring Breakers. But how did we get here? 

Trying to untangle the various proposed reboots — inevitably “gritty,” inevitably starring the popular edgy actor du jour — is an exhausting Hollywood rabbit hole. But we’re gonna do our best.

The Crow reboot buzz began with Blade and Nick Cave.

Blade director Stephen Norrington was the first name attached to direct a reboot of The Crow, in 2008. Norrington’s genre bona fides are pretty tight; in addition to his critical and commercial success with Blade — Marvel’s first big hit! — he learned special effects from industry pioneers Rick Baker, Stan Winston, and Dick Smith, who earned Oscars for their behind-the-scenes practical magic on movies like An American Werewolf in London, Jurassic Park, and the like. 

Then Nick Cave himself was brought on in July 2010 to give Norrington’s script a gothic gleam. (While we love and respect Nick Cave’s current status as elder spooky statesman, penning advice columns and going to church, this was a different era of Bad Seed, and a movie based on nearly anything Cave wrote would have been hellishly good.)

Here’s where things get tricky. The internet isn’t actually forever, as we once thought; the sites that once posted casting news and rumors about The Crow have gone through redesigns, reboots, and relaunches that have done funky things to their archives or deleted them altogether. Google’s prioritizing of paid search results, the integration of AI, and good old link rot have made it almost impossible to find the original source for some of these rumors. It’s like a game of Operator gone berserk. And honestly? Some of the actors whose names were attached to the reboot are so random that I’m skeptical they were much more than fancasting.

Mark Wahlberg was an early contender for The Crow reboot. 

In October 2010, Bloody Disgusting reported that Mark Wahlberg had been offered the lead role. A few days after this news leaked, Norrington dropped out, because an unnamed actor attached to the movie was unhappy with the script. Empire was careful to point out that it sounded like Wahlberg was not the culprit. Norrington even said, “I will say I think Wahlberg could be cool if they take a gritty blue-collar approach… He’s a truthful actor. I think he could really ground the supernatural stuff.” 

However, Wahlberg distanced himself from the project, telling the long-defunct Cinematical (via Empire) in November 2010, “We never committed to making the movie…They talked to me about it and there was a director attached who I was a fan of, and he’s no longer doing it. We just thought about it — ‘is there something cool to be done there?’ But we’re not committed to making the movie.”

In April 2011, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo was announced as the next director for the reboot. At the time, Fresnadillo (Damsel) was primarily known for the sequel 28 Weeks Later; by October of that year his departure was announced, possibly due to scheduling conflicts with a remake of Highlander. 

When asked in 2012 by Entertainment Weekly about being attached to big, buzzed-about projects that didn’t come to fruition, like an adaptation of the video game Bioshock and, of course, The Crow, he said, “Let me tell you this, it’s usual. In every interview people ask me about this. This is something all directors in Hollywood usually do. Maybe my projects are more famous or something. But it is the normal thing to do — to deal with five, six projects at the same time. Because you never know which one is going to be the proper one at the end. It’s something you have to do. The crazy thing is that you develop something and then all the newspapers are reacting.”

Jason Momoa, Channing Tatum, Ryan Gosling, and Tom Hiddleston were rumored for The Crow. 

In the meantime, Bradley Cooper was attached and then disattached, reportedly due to scheduling conflicts. That announcement via THR seems to be the first mention of Channing Tatum’s interest in the project. 

Per that same story, Relativity was also in the middle of a lawsuit with The Weinstein Company over distribution rights to The Crow: “Harvey and Co. believe they have a deal to release the film but Relativity argues that the Weinsteins forfeited their right by, among other things, botching the release of the expensive Relativity-backed flop Nine. That case is currently in arbitration.” Both companies dropped their claims by January 2012, agreeing to work together instead. But it was not to be.

Around the same time the lawsuit was dropped, Before the Fall helmer F. Javier Gutiérrez was brought on to direct a script by Jesse Wigutow (who has Tron: Ares coming out in 2025). Or maybe it was with a script by Cliff Dorfman (Warrior, Entourage). And then director Corin Hardy (The Hallow, The Nun) came onboard, spending three and a half years trying to get this bird off the ground, with Jason Momoa and all of his muscles dipped into latex attached to star — but this too fell apart!

There were more actors attached to the project, including Ryan Gosling, James McAvoy (who says it was all just “rumor mill stuff“), Tom Hiddleston (a real he-said, she-said between trade rags Deadline and The Wrap in 2013), Alexander Skarsgård at the height of his True Blood glory, Jack Huston, and Luke Evans (who was attached to the reboot for two entire years!).

At one point, Rob Zombie was attached to direct The Crow: 2037, which was sort of a spiritual three-quel, before Zombie departed and the project was abandoned in favor of The Crow: Salvation. And there was almost an untitled fourth sequel that would have starred Eminem and DMX. But it was killed by the Weinsteins a few years before Eminem broke big with 8 Mile.

The Crow rises with the help of a new studio.

Across a lot of rumors and iterations with big stars attached, most of the problems around this reboot were due to inside-baseball boring stuff about legal tussling over copyright. It boils down to the indie studio Relativity Media having an invaluable piece of intellectual property but not the resources needed to do it justice. 

Eventually, the beleaguered Relativity Media — which owned the rights to remake The Crow — filed for bankruptcy, reorganized, then filed for bankruptcy again in 2018, at which time it was bought out by investors. 

In 2016, the rights to The Crow reboot went to Samuel Hadida’s Davis Films, Highland Film Group, and Electric Shadow; Hadida was slated to produce, along with Edward R. Pressman (who produced the original and is listed as a producer on the 2024 Crow). Pressman, who passed away in 2023, was instrumental in bringing both the original Crow to the big screen and its winding road to reboot. (His son, Sam Pressman, is CEO of Pressman Film and an executive producer on The Crow 2024.) 

There are ways to play in the universe of Eric Draven that would honor the source material (which, in this case, absolutely includes Alex Proyas’ 1994 film) without making viewers feel like they’re grave-robbing. Whether or not Rupert Sanders’ take will woo viewers into enough box office lucre to afford a murder of sequels has yet to be seen — but this goth isn’t holding her breath. 

The Crow opens in theaters Aug. 23.

Read More