Summary
- The original film, The Crow, unexpectedly became a hit, leading to a failed franchise and a promising 2024 reboot facing skepticism.
- A potential The Crow film envisioned by Rob Zombie would have been dystopian, action-packed, and feature a horse-riding protagonist fighting demons.
- Zombie’s version of The Crow stayed true to the title’s essence with a new twist, combining horror, action, and supernatural elements.
Starring the late Brandon Lee as the goth-inspired title character, the 1994 big-screen adaptation of The Crow quickly became a surprising and enormous hit for Miramax Films. The cult film tells the story of a rock star, Eric Draven, who is brought back to life in order to take vengeance on those who killed him and his fiancé one night in their loft apartment. With a literal crow guiding him each and every step of the way, the young man locates and stylistically takes down every gang member who participated in this ruthless act.
As you can probably tell, The Crow was intended to be a one-and-done story. But as with any other cinematic property that wins at the box office, the solo film was inevitably turned into a franchise — with three sequels that all objectively failed. Yes, there is the upcoming June 2024 reboot that stars Bill Skarsgård as the vengeful hero and FKAW Twigs as his fiancé Shelly, but even that is already being pummeled by some media publications.
The subsequent films kept on incorporating more and more over-the-top spiritual and mystical themes. While City of Angels mixed death and rebirth with holidays like All Saints’ Day and Day of the Dead, by the time Wicked Prayer arrived, antagonists had names like Pestilence, Famine, and War and personalities to match. Even with the melodramatic spiel of The Crow series evolving over time, well-known names came to be attracted to this gritty superhero property. Not only was the rapper DMX interested in making The Crow: Lazarus in 2000, but Aquaman’s Jason Momoa was also set to put a new spin on the character before Skarsgård took over for the 2024 release.
The director behind such movies as House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects was in line to helm a Crow entry titled The Crow: 2037. Did Rob Zombie have the creative ingenuity to keep this ill-fated franchise alive? Was this iteration set in some far-off tech-savvy future? How did all of this come to be? Let’s explore together.
Combining Horror With Action in The Crow Franchise
Initially starting development in the summer of 1997, Rob Zombie’s cinematic take would have potentially diverted The Crow’s inevitable course away from City of Angels, Salvation, and Wicked Prayer. The setting would be more dystopian than you could ever imagine, and the story would be action-packed (our hero gets swallowed by a monster, for example).
Seeing how Zombie constructed his early music videos by mixing parodies of shows from the ’50s with outright grotesque horror, this technique of combining genres was already in his wheelhouse. In the official script (which has been available on the internet for years at this point), the main character Basil resides in a kind of post-apocalyptic world and uses a horse for transportation. The one aspect of The Crow which remains in Zombie’s version is, of course, the title animal resurrecting Basil when he and his mother were killed by a satanic priest many years ago on Halloween.
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Basil comes back to life but without having memories of his past self. Without any influence to lean on, he decides to grow a career in bounty hunting. Apparently, he becomes so skilled at it that he can deflect bullets with his sword, which is shown in one of the earliest scenes. Zombie also upped the supernatural aspect (just like the released sequels) by introducing demons and ghouls. You can already see why he decided to fully invest in a Munsters reboot some years later.
Zombie’s Remake vs. Lionsgate’s Reboot of The Crow
As said in an interview with Howard Stern, Rob Zombie even wanted to defy the usual age range for the main character. The iconic musician wanted to recruit actor Scott Glenn to don the signature makeup. In order to attract younger viewers, delays kept coming from Miramax Films, too, because the studio was always trying to find the biggest trends to implement into the movie (since the second turned out to be a dud). According to Zombie, Starship Troopers brought the possibility of giant bugs, and the popularity behind I Know What You Did Last Summer created the idea of an all-teen cast. All this indecision and casting speculation obviously didn’t do good for the movie’s ill-fated reputation.
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The Crow Reboot Has Been Cursed From the Start
The Crow has a well-deserved reputation for being the most cursed franchise in history.
While the main villain from the unreleased The Crow: 2037 doesn’t go much further than your typical evil priest who wants to ruin the world in order to save it, Zombie’s influence is even more seen when this rather satanic individual seeks the help of witches to see what kind of threat Basil really is. To add that species of folklore to the ever-growing list of fictional deities living within the world of The Crow 2037 (which includes monsters, ghouls, and demons), it’s safe to say that Rob Zombie was about to take this franchise into a much more fantastical direction than anyone could ever imagine. But was this unmade project actually better (in theory) than the upcoming reboot by director Rupert Sanders? Only time will tell.
