THE CROW
FLIPPING THE BIRD
REINVENTING A CULT STORY REQUIRES AUDACITY. BUT THE CREATORS OF ARE SO CONFIDENT IN THEIR NEW SPIN ON THE GOTH HERO, THEY’VE GONE THROUGH HELL AND BACK TO MAKE IT
WORDS HAYLEY CAMPBELL
Someone was going to revisit The Crow. We just didn’t know who. Since 2008, fans of Alex Proyas’ 1994 dark superhero movie — about a murdered rock musician back from the dead to seek revenge — have watched reports roll in about who was going to do it. Names of possible stars were attached and detached before it was ever confirmed they were true: Bradley Cooper, Channing Tatum, Mark Wahlberg (twice), Jason Momoa (that one got as far as leaked test footage). Potential directors included Blade’s Stephen Norrington, 28 Weeks Later’s Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, Corin Hardy, and more. At one point in 2010, hopes were raised when there were rumours that Nick Cave was doing some form of script revision — The Crow is a graphic novel and a film that held music close to its goth black heart. For a while, everything went quiet. And then: someone actually revisited The Crow.
When Empire asks director Rupert Sanders why, after all these years, it was him, he laughs and says, “Tenacity.” He adds, “Sometimes these things just have their time. They work when they’re supposed to work. I just feel that this was probably the right iteration.” He also thinks it’s a case of how it was made, not why: outside the studio system, for a fraction of the budget of current superhero movies, and far less than Sanders himself has worked with in the past (his first film, Snow White & The Huntsman, cost $180 million). “People are calling it a Hollywood remake and it’s really not. There’s nothing to do with Hollywood in this movie at all — it’s a very scrappy indie movie,” he says. “[And] because of that, we were able to remain close to the centre and the darkness and the violence that’s in the graphic novel. The only reason we could do that is because it’s not a studio movie.”
Given how fervently the fanbase protects the first movie, some might also add another word in addition to tenacity: bravery. This was the film in which Brandon Lee, playing Eric Draven, tragically lost his life in an accident on set with a prop gun at the age of 28. This was the film that wasn’t just a film; it remains a hallowed target of worship. If you are of a certain age, you will remember how posters for The Crow hung for a weirdly long time in the video shop, how you wore out the soundtrack on your Walkman, how on more than one occasion someone told you that the set was cursed, actually. For some, the idea of revisiting The Crow is as impossible as waking the dead.