THE reworked film reboot of The Crow has officially found a director – and a lead actor.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bill Skarsgård will star as main protagonist Eric Draven in the upcoming reboot of the dark supernatural comic book adaptation, which is set to be directed by Rupert Sanders from a script by Zach Baylin. Edward R. Pressman and Malcolm Gray are producing the film.
Besides Skarsgård, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter FKA twigs is also set to star in this “modern reimagining” of the story of Draven, a murdered musician who rises from the grave to avenge his fiancée’s killing.
In a statement, director Sanders said: “The Crow is beautiful, dark, poetic, and sometimes disturbing
“It is a story of love, loss, grief, and revenge. It is a great honour to revisit James O’Barr’s iconic comic and reimagine The Crow as a foreboding voice of today.”
This seems to be the most promising news in a while for a new Crow film, various versions of which have been mired in development hell for more than a decade. Most recently, a prospective reboot starring Jason Momoa fell apart in 2018 after both the Aquaman star and director Corin Hardy departed the project.
The original Crow film was released in 1994, and starred Brandon Lee as the title character. The movie was marred by Lee’s death during production after the actor was struck by a bullet from a prop gun on set.
Still, a 1996 sequel, The Crow: City of Angels, followed, as did two direct-to-video follow-ups, The Crow: Salvation in 2000 and The Crow: Wicked Prayer in 2005.
Fans of the comic and the original film have held out hope for a new retelling of the iconic story, which is often cited as the first ‘dark’ comic book movie.
The Swedish-born Skarsgård is perhaps best known for his role as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the 2017 film reboot of Stephen King’s It and its 2019 sequel, It Chapter Two. He is also no stranger to comic book adaptations, having portrayed Axel Cluney/Zeitgeist in the 2018 X-Men spinoff film Deadpool 2 and the Deviant Kro in the 2021 Marvel Cinematic Universe film Eternals.
