Cult classic The Crow has found itself trending twice this year, first in January as fans marked what would have been the 56th birthday of leading man Brandon Lee, and again in May when Alex Proyas’ atmospheric Gothic fable celebrated its 27th anniversary. While it did lead to several disappointing sequels, a reboot of the original has remained one of the toughest nuts in Hollywood to crack.
The project was first announced in 2008 with Blade‘s Stephen Norrington poised to end his self-imposed exile following The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, before it passed though the hands of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and Francisco Javier Gutierrez before ending up in Corin Hardy’s lap.
Hardy came a lot closer than anybody else to actually getting The Crow in front of cameras, settling on Jason Momoa as his leading man following a revolving door of speculation that had named Tom Hiddleston, Luke Evans, Bradley Cooper, Mark Wahlberg, James McAvoy, Ryan Gosling, Channing Tatum, Sam Witwer, Alexander Skarsgard, Jack Huston, Nicholas Hoult and Jack O’Connell as either signing on, being in the running or entering talks.
Of course, it still hasn’t happened yet and Hardy went on to gain some additional clout in the industry by helming The Nun, which remains the single highest-grossing installment in The Conjuring Universe, history’s most commercially successful horror franchise. In a new interview, the filmmaker admitted that he still hasn’t given up on The Crow just yet.
“It’s a story that I’m just in love with and wedded towards and I put three and a half, four years of life into and love and blood and sweat and tears, and I have a ton of materials, so I don’t know whether one day. I suppose I’m not really wanting to show them because I still believe there will be a Crow sometime, but we’ll see.
I do think both James O’Barr’s original Crow graphic novel and the subsequent other iterations of that character in the comic books, there’s no reason not to do a lot more with that character, the concept of The Crow, the mythology of The Crow, and the tone and what that represents is still unique within the world we’re in at the moment.
You’d have thought the director of The Nun teaming up with a star on Jason Momoa’s level to reboot a brand with a built-in fanbase would be a no-brainer, but for whatever reason The Crow has struggled to escape from development hell.