The Crow's remake opened over the weekend to thunderous indifference. Photo / Lionsgate
THREE KEY FACTS
Robbie Collin is the Chief Film Critic at The Telegraph.
OPINION
Films absolutely nobody wants to see keep making pitiful sums at the box office. How do blatantly bad ideas end up on screen?
“Nobody knows anything,” runs the screenwriter William Goldman’s famous maxim about success in Hollywood. But you have to imagine that somebody, somewhere must have had an inkling about this.
Lionsgate’s remake of The Crow – the 1990s cult hit that made a posthumous icon of its star Brandon Lee – opened over the weekend to thunderous indifference. Reviews were largely abysmal: its Rotten Tomatoes score currently stands at 19%, with “not unwatchable” (Variety) among the handful of more positive takes. But with just US$4.6 million ($7.36m) of tickets shifted in the US – British figures have yet to be shared – the public was arguably even less enthused.
Did anyone not see this coming? True, the original adaptation of The Crow, released 30 years prior, was an unexpected US$100m hit with a cultural impact that still endures among its Gen X fanbase. So arguably, as a marketer might say, “the audience was there”. But crucially, nothing that the audience found remarkable about the original could have been repeated in a re-do.
Its storm-lashed, eyeliner-streaked aesthetic struck a sonorous chord at the height of the goth craze, while the accidental on-set death of its leading man – during the filming of his character’s own execution scene, no less – only enhanced the project’s tragic and/or ghoulish mystique. Without the timeliness and tragedy, all that was left was the lovesick undead avenger, which by all accounts director Rupert Sanders failed to turn into a charismatic antihero for our times. (I say by all accounts because in Britain The Crow wasn’t shown to critics, and I can’t say I felt much of a burning desire over the weekend to catch up.)
What’s more, the course of its production was anything but as the crow flies. Since the new adaptation was announced in 2008, it frantically cycled through writers and directors, plus enough leading men to pack out a Ford Transit. (Mark Wahlberg, Bradley Cooper, James McAvoy, Tom Hiddleston, Luke Evans and Jason Momoa were among the 12 to have been linked to the role before Sanders – himself director No 5 – settled on Bill Skarsgard in 2022.)
So if its failure seemed inevitable, why did Hollywood spend US$50m over the past 16 years – not including marketing and distribution – trying to find a way to make it work?
The answer is complex but revealing, and ropes in a number of 2024′s other more conspicuous duds.
First, note that this has been a solid rather than glorious year so far for cinemas, with Northern Hemisphere summer takings falling somewhere between those of 2022 and 2023. Two significant test cases performed better than anyone expected: Inside Out 2, which felt like a referendum on Pixar’s post-Covid appeal, and Deadpool & Wolverine, the year’s lone riposte to all that talk of Marvel fatigue. And elsewhere, a mixture of legacy sequels (Twisters), canny BookTok adaptations (It Ends With Us) and elevated genre entertainments (Longlegs) all found room to thrive.
But disaster has also struck regularly, and without any immediately discernible method. The Crow ‘24 was a legacy sequel. Madame Web, which became a global laughingstock in February, was the latest instalment in a venerable comic-book franchise. Argylle, with its dismal reviews and toxic word-of-mouth (if its plummeting takings were anything to go by) was an original espionage thriller with a star-studded cast. Fly Me to the Moon, with Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, was a stylish period romantic comedy with two usually bankable stars. The Fall Guy wasn’t that different a proposition, albeit with stunts in place of swish 60s fashion, and Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in the spotlight.
Borderlands, a Cate Blanchett-starring sci-fi caper with vague Guardians of the Galaxy vibes, was an adaptation of a long-running hit video game series. Harold and the Purple Crayon reimagined a classic illustrated children’s book in live-action. Horizon: An American Saga – Part 1 was a handsomely old-fashioned western serial. Changing tastes alone might account for the failure of two or three of these. But if none of this varied slate worked – and it emphatically did not – what on earth is Hollywood missing?
Their CinemaScores provide some clarifying intel. CinemaScore is a polling firm in the US that operates in cinema foyers and asks opening weekend attendees to rate the film they’ve just seen on a scale from A+ to F. It isn’t much use as a measure of quality, but it does neatly capture whether the film’s natural constituency got what it expected.
And in three of those cases – The Fall Guy, Fly Me to the Moon and Harold and the Purple Crayon, all of which scored a respectable A- on average – they did. The problem here is that audiences have yet to be retrained to take chances on original (or original-ish) unknown titles after the double-whammy of the franchise-crazed 2010s and the cinema-habit-killing pandemic. And solving this is the work not of a couple of summers, but a number of years.
The other titles fared notably less well. Like The Crow, Horizon was a bland B-. Madame Web a crummy C+; Borderlands a dismal D+. (Generally speaking, anything below B+ spells trouble.) And like The Crow, their failure to win over even the audiences that wanted to like them didn’t come as much of a shock.
Horizon, a long-simmering Kevin Costner passion project, is – for the purposes of this exercise, anyway – something of a red herring. After his career was rejuvenated by the Paramount Plus series Yellowstone, Costner gambled that the show’s fans would follow him back into cinemas for this largely self-funded multi-part epic. And for the most part, they did not.
But the remaining three are films of a depressingly common modern type: blatantly bad ideas whose existence can be justified on a spreadsheet. The Crow was popular 30 years ago, so it’s high time to bring it back. (Except, as we’ve seen, nothing that made the original so impactful can be brought back.)
Madame Web fits into the Spider-Man universe, and everyone loves all things Spider-Man. (Except only up to a point: when any mention of Spider-Man himself is conspicuously absent due to the movie-franchise equivalent of a restraining order, these things can easily turn laughable, as 2022′s Morbius proved.) Borderlands has an enormous existing global fanbase, with more than 77m units sold worldwide to date. (Except you’d imagine most of them would rather just play the game than watch a dramatised version of it.)
All these excepts might seem painfully clear to you and I. But for an industry at a crossroads – with franchises toppling and the streaming boom cooling – they’re less forbidding than the prospect of not looking busy in uncertain times. Obviously, the smart thing for Lionsgate to have done with the US$50m it cost to remake The Crow would have been to make two or five or 10 new urban fantasy films, any of which might have ended up being to 2024 what The Crow was to 1994 three decades ago. Artistically it’s more worthwhile. But even in the most gimlet-eyed, cynical terms, it would have allowed it to spread its investments and minimise the risk.
Any one of those investments – heck, maybe even all of them – might have paid out big. But since it would have been impossible to make a simple case for them as individual films – “bear with us at this especially nerve-racking moment for the business while we take a series of shots in the dark” – The Crow ‘24 is what we got instead.
It’s clear that cinema-goers have yet to rediscover their taste for the unknown. But Hollywood could do worse than lead by example.
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.