After a solid quarter-century of trying to get out of direct-to-video hell, there’s finally been some movement on making a new adaptation of James O’Barr’s comic The Crow, best known for being brought to the screen by Alex Proyas with Brandon Lee (RIP) in the main role back in ’94, and transforming a whole new generation of kids into the kind of goth nerd that thinks the NIN cover of “Dead Souls” is better than the Joy Division original (they’re wrong, but the original does have the best Cure needle-drop ever in it). Bradley Cooper was going to star and possibly direct a couple of years back, but A Star is Born priced him out. So what did Lionsgate decide to do instead? Hire the guy who made the live-action Ghost in the Shell (and made all the wrong headlines when making the Snow White movie), get Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs to star, and hire the folks who decided to give Jared Leto his bedazzled smile in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad to do your make-up design.
Vanity Fair dropped a whole bunch of new images from Rupert Sanders’ reboot, and we’ve chosen to spotlight the one where he actually, uh, looks like The Crow. You will be astounded to discover that not even the whitest of white face paint can conceal those face tattoos that Skarsgård sports here:
Yup, that’ll definitely get all the Zoomers out to this one. If you want some story clues, there’s a bunch of awesome guidebooks to Russian Prison Tattoos available at your local indie bookstore, and maybe they’ll help you figure out exactly what the hell is happening on that man’s chest.
Anyway, Sanders gave some choice quotes to Vanity Fair about the project, including this amazing soundbite:
“I think the beauty of Bill is that he has a disturbing beauty, and as he transforms through his loss he becomes this thing that even he can’t control. It’s that famous line: ‘Whoever fights monsters must be careful that they don’t become one.’ That look was me in the ’90s when we were squat-raving in London, [mixed with some modern influences] like Post Malone and Lil Peep. I hope people who are 19 today look at him and go, ‘That guy is us.’“
To quote one of Sanders’ contemporaries, “Ay caramba.”
Seriously, though, don’t have a cow until you see the final product, man, even though this seems like what too much Tubthumping does to a motherfucker. The Crow hits theaters on June 7.