Despite what you may have heard on the internet, when a movie is remade, no matter how it turns out, it’s not actually “spitting in the face of the original” and it’s not trying to erase the original. Just ask Disney, who made billion-dollar-grossing, yet polarizing, remakes of the likes of The Lion King and Aladdin and then went right back to making nearly all of their merchandise based on the original versions. And a remake certainly can’t “ruin” the original, which will endure on its own merits beyond any new version.
Similarly, there’d be a lot less stress from a lot of people if more folks could accept that if a character becomes iconic and beloved enough, different actors will probably eventually play them. Only Bela Lugosi can play Dracula! …until someone else did. Only Sean Connery can play James Bond! …until someone else did. And sure, we then go on to endlessly debate who’s the better Bond or Batman or any other famous creation, but that can be part of the fun, along with the constant speculation about who will play them next.
But, of course, there are always exceptions to a rule and special circumstances that can come into play. And one big exception when it comes to casting a new actor in a familiar role is The Crow and how it’s particularly ill-advised to recast Eric Draven. Especially when Eric Draven isn’t needed for a new Crow movie.
The Tragedy of Brandon Lee
Brandon Lee’s death on the set of the 1994 version of The Crow was a truly awful and heartbreaking event. So many questions were raised about how a mistake this monumental could have occurred, as a supposed blank round became lethal when fired at Lee during production thanks to negligence – a situation horrifically echoed recently with the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust.
Because I’m about to delve into Brandon Lee on a symbolic level – mostly about his perception from the outside – I want to once more stress that, more than anything, Brandon Lee was a very real person who should still be enjoying a long and successful career and the love and support of his friends and family. He’s still rightfully adored by fans, but it’s impossible not to ponder what it would have been like if he’d wrapped up production on The Crow and simply gone on to his next film and many after that. But that wasn’t to be.
Instead, he wouldn’t survive making The Crow. And in the process, he’d become a mythical figure, frequently evoked among other “gone far too soon” Hollywood tragedies.
Lee truly feeling like he was born to play Eric Draven is forever intertwined with it being the role that would kill him.
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It makes sense why Lee would be elevated to icon status and, with him, the character of Eric Draven. Lee is fantastic in The Crow and it very much feels like this was always going to be his star-making role, after years of being cultivated as the next big action star in the likes of Showdown in Little Tokyo and Rapid Fire. But the messed up thing is how Lee truly feeling like he was born to play Eric Draven is forever intertwined with it being the role that would kill him.
From afar, it sounds made up. An actor is hired to play a character who returns from the dead after being shot to death and then, while filming the scene in which his character dies, he is accidentally truly shot to death on set. It’s bizarre and awful but also, as hard as it may be to say, it’s an instantly compelling story. One that couldn’t help but become mythic in nature.
This event cemented the perception of Brandon Lee and Eric Draven as one and the same in a way I don’t think can ever truly be matched – or certainly in a way we’d never want to be matched. He wasn’t just great in this role, but it was his final role. But far beyond that, he didn’t just embody the character, he quite literally died playing the character and the circumstances of his death unmistakably echoed the character’s death. The Crow is so much about the tragedy of Eric and his fiance Shelly’s death and here was a movie that was now unavoidably steeped in the real-life tragedy of the man starring in it.
In fact, there was a notable contingent of people at the time of Lee’s death who felt it was ghoulish to even finish and release The Crow for these reasons. And while I ultimately didn't agree with them, I very much can understand their point of view. Watching Brandon Lee play Eric Draven (a character who is shot over and over again after he returns from the dead), knowing what happened on set, is at times weird and sad. Yet grimly and eerily, it adds to the film’s power. I feel confident The Crow would have been a great movie no matter what, as director Alex Proyas brings so much atmosphere and cool energy to the horror-action hybrid, and Lee is so dynamic as Eric, aided by an excellent supporting cast and one hell of a great soundtrack. But it now had an added depth for a very tragic reason.
It’s OK for The Crow to Not Be About Eric Draven
All of which to say is, if you’re going to do a new Crow movie, why does it have to be about Eric? O.K., The Crow sequels made about other characters were all pretty weak, but they weren’t weak because they were about other characters being brought back to avenge their death by the mythical Crow. They were just poorly made movies.
As a concept and as a comic book, The Crow has never been an ongoing story of Eric Draven. Inevitably, especially after the movie made the character so well known, he was brought back in a couple of stories, but by and large, the comics have simply told different tales about different people, sometimes in different eras, being brought back by The Crow. And while a higher-budget reboot of The Crow has been in development for years (with the likes of Bradley Cooper, Jason Momoa and Mark Wahlberg attached at different points), I’d always be surprised to learn they were still planning to do the Eric Draven story again. The problem isn’t that it’s been done before, since we get remakes all the time, good and bad, telling a story we’ve seen before, and we also get new actors playing familiar roles all the time.
The specific problem here is the Eric Draven character is so completely intertwined with one actor, not simply because of how good they were in the role but because of the uniquely dark and sad scenario that occurred around them playing that role. It’s only natural for fans to elevate this character and be extra protective of any attempt to replicate what we saw in 1994. So why burden yourself with that? Just make a new Crow movie about a different person! If you want, you can do the requel approach and, say, bring back Ernie Hudson to connect it to the original a bit. Or it can 100% stand on its own with new characters in a new setting. But once you say “This is the new Eric Draven,” it’s going to be incredibly difficult for people to accept, even with a strong performer like Bill Skarsgard in the role.
And yes, someone already played Eric Draven after Brandon Lee, as Mark Dacascos starred as Eric in the 1998-1999 TV series, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven. I’m a fan of Dacascos’ but that was a big mistake too, first off for trying to tell the Eric story again while failing to evoke any of its weight, but also for taking the tension out of the entire concept by having Eric come back and then just stick around, as his search for revenge became long enough to last for 22 episodes.
None of this means the 2024 version of The Crow will intrinsically be a bad film in and of itself. The trailer didn’t excite me but it also had some moments of visual flair, which makes sense given director Rupert Sanders does have a way with stylistic flourishes. The trailer also hints at much more time spent with Eric and Shelly together before their deaths, which is a nice way to differentiate it and deepen her as a character, even as it feels like they may unnecessarily tie Shelly’s past into why they are killed. But there’s a much bigger burden and higher bar for the film than it ever needed because the filmmakers decided to focus the story on Eric Draven again. And Eric Draven will forever be Brandon Lee because Brandon Lee never got the chance to be anyone else afterwards.
