Poor Eric Draven, first he and his girlfriend are murdered, now the poor guy keeps having problems getting his franchise rebooted. Dude can’t catch a break. The attempt to reboot The Crow has a new problem to add to its growing list. Most of the film’s production team just walked off the job.
The Hollywood Reporter has the story about everybody leaving the project. It’s all fallout from the recently announced bankruptcy of Relativity Media. Bankruptcy doesn’t close the doors and so Relativity is apparently still working toward going into production this fall. That could be difficult however, as the rights to a valuable property like The Crow are just the sort of thing that judges like to force you to sell as part of bankruptcy settlements.
Of course, the other problem with going into production on The Crow is that they are still short The Crow. After first casting Luke Evans for the role of lead Eric Draven he dropped out several months ago. He was replaced by Boardwalk Empire’s Jack Huston, but he recently had to drop out as well. While there are apparently a couple of possible replacements being considered, in Nicholas Hoult and Jack O’Connell, no announcements have been made yet.
Now in addition to hiring a lead, they'll need to hire a bunch of production staff as well. While it isn't specified who on the production side has left the project, several department heads have apparently done so. Once they hire new people to replace the old people, there will likely then be changes made by those people, which will only delay things more. This just adds to the amount of work that will need to be done if this movie is ever going to happen.
All of this follows the fact that Relativity was actually sued by the Weinstein’s over their Crow remake. The suit was eventually settled and everything on that end appears fine, but the costs couldn’t have helped Relativity’s bottom line. Finally we can add the fact that many fans of the original aren’t sure they even want to see a new Crow movie. The original has achieved a kind of mythic status, due in no small part to Brandon Lee's death while shooting. Luke Evans said the new film would leave the Brandon Lee original alone, back when he was still attached, so there’s that.
The attempt at getting this film made has been going on since 2009 so it’s just been one thing after another keeping the movie from getting made. There are at least a couple people who would like to see this movie get made. They have apparently cast their villain, as well as an actress to play Eric’s friend Shelly, so whenever everybody else is ready to make a movie, they should be ready for you.
