While The Crow’s titular vengeance-seeking spirit famously said, “it can’t rain all the time,” he probably couldn’t fathom the comically bad luck of the remake project, which just lost its star and director. Again.
The Crow reboot project has been the film industry’s equivalent of Teflon for the about the past decade, since Sony Pictures can’t seem to find a star or director to stick around. However, after years of turnovers, the team of would-be star Jason Momoa and would-be director Corin Hardy felt like an auspicious pairing, and, last we heard, the project was finally on track to begin production in a little over a month… until it wasn’t.
Indeed, in a bit of news that’s simultaneously astonishing and predictable, The Crow reboot movie has, once again, lost its star (in this case, Jason Momoa,) and its director (in this case, Corin Hardy), according to Deadline. While even the Momoa/Hardy reboot team (pictured below from last year,) had starts and stops over the past few years, it is now being reported that “creative and financial difficulties” with producer Samuel Hadida – head of financing studio Davis Films – ended up serving as the final straw for this collaboration. The Hadida drama also stems to the producer’s apparent inability to close the deal with Sony Pictures, which apparently made the studio’s exit from the project imminent.
Indeed, of all the setbacks experienced by this plot-appropriately cursed production, this may be the most vexing, since the film had been in full preproduction with director Hardy and it occurs just five weeks before cameras were scheduled to roll in Budapest. Moreover, as recent as March, Sony had set the release date of October 11th 2019, which seemed to be as surefire of a sign that The Crow reboot would, at long last, fly. Now, unfortunately, the project’s been pulled back to terra firma.
The Crow story adapts the original 1989 graphic novel of James O’Barr, who’s remained very active during the reboot project’s tumultuous process (we’ll probably hear him chime on this latest development soon enough). The property is, of course, best known from director Alex Proya’s 1994 film adaptation starring Brandon Lee, in which the star was killed during an on-set accident. While there were soft-rebooted sequels in 1996’s The Crow: City Of Angels and subsequent straight-to-video follow-ups in 2000’s The Crow: Salvation and 2005’s The Crow: Wicked Prayer, the property never quite recaptured its 1994 pop culture splendor.
At this point, some seven years after the project was initially announced, Jason Momoa now joins a (frankly, impressive,) list of would-be stars The Crow, which consists of Bradley Cooper, James McAvoy, Norman Reedus, Luke Evans and Jack Huston. Moreover, Corin Hardy joins a legacy line that included names such as F. Javier Gutiérrez and (in a previous reboot iteration,) Rob Zombie. It will certainly be interesting to see how/if the project moves forward from this point.