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The 2024 take on The Crow is a lot of things, but it’s also not a lot of things. It is a bad movie, but it didn’t have to be. As soon as someone pitched doing The Crow again, many fans raged against the idea. There was a worst-case scenario and an ideal way forward, but Bill Skarsgard’s turn in the trench coat doesn’t reach either extreme. It’s worth unpacking how hard this project was, why they probably shouldn’t have made it, and how it avoided complete infamy.
The Crow (2024) Is Not a Remake
The world immediately rebelled against the idea of a new version of The Crow. Alex Proyas’ 1994 adaptation of James O’Barr’s comic series remains a cult classic. That film deserves its flowers, but it’s also forever entangled in the tragic on-set death of its star, Brandon Lee. One version of The Crow has been in production since 2008. The iteration that hit the screen probably started around 2020. From the start, everyone in the world insisted that a remake of Alex Proyas’ film was an act of sacrilege. No one could replace Brandon Lee, and attempting to do so would earn outrage. Thankfully, The Crow (2024) is in no way a remake of The Crow (1994.) The plot is fundamentally different, the film’s presentation bears almost no resemblance to the original, and there are blessedly few callbacks or references. It is, however, still kind of a mess.
The initial pitch for the new take on The Crow was that it would reinterpret the comic book source material. The 1994 film had a lot of unique differences that a new take could divert from. James O’Barr compared it to two different film adaptations of Dracula. They’d work from the same source but deliver wholly different results. The film that came out this August is not that, either. It has a couple fresh nods to the comic, but it’s much farther away from O’Barr’s work than the original film. The new lore, for example, is a tangled mess, while the comic presented its supernatural elements with an almost improvisational flair. The film invents a few characters, but most of them are awful. It’s not a remake, but it’s certainly not a closer interpretation. That leaves a pretty obvious question hanging in the air.
Why is the Crow That Crow?
Fans of The Crow comic series know that there are a lot of different people who wear the mantle. In 1996, James O’Barr released The Crow: Dead Time, the first of many spin-off series. It stars Joshua, a Native American man who returns from the dead to take revenge against the Wild West marauders who killed him. A few months later, Miramax put out The Crow: City of Angels. The studio desperately wanted a franchise out of Proyas’ cult classic, but they knew they couldn’t recast their lead character. They followed O’Barr’s lead, creating a new victim of terrible violence who could gain the crow’s powers and seek revenge. The other movie sequels and comic series follow the same patterns. They adopt an edgy subtitle and start fresh with a new hero. There are more than 20 people behind that distinctive makeup. So, why is Bill Skarsgård playing Eric?
We all know the answer, unfortunately. Eric is the only Crow anyone can name because he’s the only one Brandon Lee brought to life. The studio likely insisted that this film still featured the basic elements people understand. It must still be a guy named Eric saving a lady named Shelly. Simply changing their name would have offered the film so much freedom as an adaptation. Bizarrely, there is a saving grace here. The comics never gave Eric a surname. Alex Proyas’ film dubbed him Eric Draven. Aside from the 1998 TV series, Brandon Lee is the one and only Eric Draven. Despite early reports, Bill Skarsgård’s character has no surname. This was a compromise, but it’s still a half-measure. This could have been so much easier.
The Crow (2024) is a disaster, but it could have been a more understandable one with a couple of key changes. All they had to do was add a colon and a couple of edgy words to the title, then change the lead characters’ names. They could have launched a franchise off of that, even in its current state. It wouldn’t matter that this one sucked, because the next one could follow a different character through a new story. Almost all of The Crow movies are terrible, but they soldiered on without an ounce of self-reflection. The studio wouldn’t allow that. Every entry since City of Angels featured the creators fighting the studio. The modern franchise system won this time, but only barely. The Crow should have stayed dead, but there was a correct way to bring it back.
