“When someone you love dies, you will know emptiness… You will never forget, and you will never, ever forgive.” — Eric Draven

The Crow is a remake built around a reasonable idea—returning to James O’Barr’s graphic novel rather than photocopying Alex Proyas’s 1994 cult film—but Rupert Sanders’s 2024 version never discovers why this material matters beyond its tattoos, bruises, and black eyeliner. It arrived dead on arrival with critics and audiences alike, not simply because it was measured against a beloved predecessor, but because it offered so little of its own identity. The film is dour without being haunting, romantic without generating much chemistry, and violent without making its revenge feel especially cathartic.

Sanders’s film stars Bill Skarsgård as Eric and musician FKA twigs as Shelly, lovers brutally murdered after stumbling too close to the secrets of criminal impresario Vincent Roeg, played with sleek, vaguely supernatural menace by Danny Huston. Eric awakens in a liminal afterlife, is granted a path back to the living world, and returns armed with supernatural endurance and a need to avenge Shelly. The fundamentals are familiar: love is destroyed by violence, death cannot sever that love, and vengeance becomes a darkly mythic expression of grief. Yet The Crow continually confuses the bare outline of that story with the emotional force that made it endure.

The production’s troubled history almost feels encoded in the finished movie. A new Crow film spent more than a decade trapped in development hell, cycling through different studios, directors, screenplays, and potential stars. Relativity Pictures held the project for years; Sony eventually became involved; various versions had names such as Bradley Cooper, Luke Evans, Jack Huston, and Jason Momoa attached at different stages, alongside filmmakers including Stephen Norrington, F. Javier Gutiérrez, and Corin Hardy. The project repeatedly stalled under changing rights arrangements, creative disagreements, and the general instability that often turns a familiar title into an endlessly recycled pitch deck. A fresh production effort was announced in 2020, but the Sanders version did not actually begin shooting until 2022 in Prague.wikipedia+2

That prolonged development makes the final product feel less like a passionately argued reinterpretation than a compromise that survived by default. Every era of the project seems to have left a trace. There is a prestige-minded desire to make Eric and Shelly psychologically damaged and contemporary. There is a franchise-minded urge to expand the supernatural mythology. There is also a music-video impulse toward body art, club scenes, fashionable misery, and sharply composed violence. None of these ingredients are automatically bad. But Sanders never finds a way to make them cohere into a world as tactile, strange, or emotionally immediate as the one Alex Proyas created in 1994.

The suspicion around the remake was understandable from the beginning. Most people involved in the original film have either expressed mixed feelings or outright disapproval about revisiting the property. The 1994 The Crow is not merely another cult favorite awaiting intellectual-property renewal. It is permanently linked to Brandon Lee, who was killed in an on-set shooting accident during production. The completed film became a memorial as much as a comic-book adaptation, and its emotional impact cannot be separated from the knowledge of what happened to its star.

The strongest objections have come from James O’Barr and Alex Proyas. O’Barr, writer and artist of the original graphic novel, has questioned the need for a remake for years, once calling the idea of remaking a then-15-year-old film “kind of ridiculous.” Proyas, meanwhile, has been even more direct. He argued that The Crow was not simply a movie because Brandon Lee died making it, and that the 1994 film should remain part of Lee’s legacy. When the new film’s reception turned hostile, Proyas called it a “cynical cash-grab” and mocked the lack of financial reward supposedly waiting at the end of it. The tone of those comments may strike some people as harsh, but the remake never makes a convincing counterargument.

To be fair, Sanders does not ask Skarsgård to imitate Lee. That is one of the film’s better instincts. Skarsgård’s Eric is physically slight, heavily tattooed, insecure, and visibly wrecked by the life he has lived before death. He is not a supernatural rock-and-roll avenger in the same way Lee was. Instead, he resembles a wounded, emotionally arrested young man forced into a mythic role he does not fully understand. It is a potentially interesting angle, especially for a story about grief turning someone into a monster.

But the screenplay, credited to Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, does not give that approach enough shape. Eric is vulnerable, then dreamy, then brutally efficient, then mournful again, depending on what the scene needs. The film treats emotional instability as character depth, but those are not the same thing. A character can be fractured, contradictory, and self-destructive while still possessing a recognizable inner life. Skarsgård does what he can with the material, bringing real physical discomfort and sadness to Eric, yet the movie seems more interested in how his pain photographs than what it reveals.

The same issue affects Shelly. FKA twigs has an immediately magnetic screen presence, and the film wisely spends much more time on Eric and Shelly before their deaths than the 1994 film did. In theory, that should be a major advantage. If the viewer sees the relationship develop, then Eric’s return from death should carry more emotional force. Instead, the early sections feel like a montage stretched into an act: rehab, drugs, late-night intimacy, mutual confessions, music, dancing, sex, and shared trauma. The movie repeatedly tells us that these two are soulmates, but it rarely gives them the specific dialogue, humor, disagreements, or small gestures that make a romance believable.

Their relationship becomes a collection of poses. The camera understands that they are beautiful, sad, damaged people; the script never quite proves they are deeply connected individuals. That is fatal in The Crow, because Eric’s entire mission depends on the audience accepting that Shelly is not merely the woman he loved but the person who made life worth returning to. The movie substitutes trauma bonding for intimacy, assuming that shared wounds automatically equal love.

Huston’s Vincent Roeg is similarly underwritten. Roeg is introduced as an elegant criminal figure with occult powers, someone who preys on young women and sustains himself through a diabolical bargain. It is a significant departure from the relatively grounded gangland evil of the 1994 film, and it could have opened the door to something genuinely grotesque. Instead, the mythology grows more complicated while the villain becomes less interesting. Roeg speaks in the familiar language of immortal bad guys who are convinced that cruelty makes them profound. He lacks the memorable theatricality of the original film’s antagonists and the unnerving specificity that a character like this needs.

The remake’s expanded mythology is perhaps its biggest miscalculation. O’Barr’s original premise has always been powerful because it is so direct: a murdered man is allowed to return, guided by a crow, because love has been violently cut short. It is gothic, but it is simple. Sanders’s version adds a network of afterlife rules, soul exchanges, purgatorial spaces, and supernatural transactions. The more the film explains, the less mythical it feels. Grief does not become larger through lore. In this case, it becomes bogged down in mechanics.

Visually, Sanders has moments of genuine flair. The film’s strongest sequence comes late, when Eric tears through an opera house during a lavish performance. White costumes are stained red, the setting’s exaggerated grandeur clashes with Eric’s raw violence, and the action is staged with a sense of grotesque spectacle. It is the one scene where Sanders’s instincts as a visual stylist really connect with the source material’s heightened pulp melodrama. The sequence is bloody, theatrical, and almost absurd enough to become exhilarating.

Yet it arrives too late and feels disconnected from much of what precedes it. For large stretches, The Crow is subdued to the point of visual anonymity. Its darkness looks digitally smoothed rather than dreamlike. Its city does not have a personality. Its criminal underworld feels interchangeable with any number of slick streaming thrillers. The 1994 film’s Detroit-like nightmare city was impossible to separate from its mood: rain-slicked streets, scorched interiors, industrial rot, grotesque criminals, and an unforgettable goth-grunge soundtrack all fused into one singular aesthetic. Sanders’s movie has better technology but far less texture.

The soundtrack, in particular, exposes the remake’s uncertainty. The 1994 Crow became inseparable from its music, which drew together alternative rock, industrial, metal, and goth influences into an extension of Eric’s world. The 2024 version clearly wants to speak to a newer generation through contemporary pop, electronic, and melancholy club sensibilities. There is nothing wrong with modernizing the musical language, but the choices do not build a coherent subculture around the film. They play as individual selections rather than part of a living, breathing atmosphere.

This is why the remake’s negative response was so predictable. It was not doomed merely because it remade a movie people love, nor because any new Eric Draven would inevitably be compared to Brandon Lee. A remake could have justified itself by drawing more deeply from O’Barr’s graphic novel, creating a truly different visual language, or foregrounding the grief at the center of the story with more honesty. Sanders instead gives us a film that is constantly signaling pain while remaining emotionally remote.

There are fragments of a better Crow scattered throughout: Skarsgård’s willingness to play Eric as fragile and unglamorous, twigs’s spectral intensity, and the opera-house massacre’s gleefully excessive bloodshed. But those fragments never combine into a whole. The Crow has the eyeliner, the tattoos, the wounds, and the bird, but it never finds the heart beneath them. The original film endured because it turned loss into a piece of feverish gothic pulp. This remake turns loss into an aesthetic, and that is not nearly enough.