Lionsgate have released the trailer for The Crow, director Rupert Sanders (Ghost in the Shell, Snow White and the Huntsman)’s new take on the gothic comic by James O’Barr, starring Bill Skarsgård as Eric Draven, and FKA Twigs as Shelly Webster:
The trailer reveals a new inciting incident for Eric and Shelly’s tragic love story, whose murders transform Eric into the vengeful revenant guided by the title spirit; here, the couple are killed after Shelly witnesses Danny Huston’s unnamed occultist (who appears to be an opera house owner) murder a young woman (1899‘s Isabella Wei.) The film also expands on the source material by showing Eric and Shelly meeting in juvie, and by introducing a spirit (French-Tunisian actor Sami Bouajila) explaining Eric’s situation to him.
This version of Draven has a decidedly more modern look than the original, with shorter hair, no make-up, and multiple tattoos, similar to current musicians: in an interview with Vanity Fair, Sanders commented, “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.’”
The Crow, also featuring Laura Birn (Foundation) and Jordan Bolger (The Book of Boba Fett), will be released in theaters on June 7. It arrives 30 years after the original film starring Brandon Lee, who died following a firearms accident on the set of the film, and marks the first film version since that one to feature Draven as the protagonist. However, Skarsgård will actually be the third actor to play Eric; Mark Dacascos previously portrayed the part on the 1998-99 TV series The Crow: Stairway to Heaven.
Sanders told Vanity Fair, “Obviously, [Lee’s death] was a terrible tragedy, and it’s definitely something that we’ve always had in mind through the making of the film. Brandon was an original voice and I think he will always be synonymous with The Crow and I hope he’s proud of what we’ve done and how we’ve brought the story back again. His soul is very much alive in this film. There’s a real fragility and beauty to his version of the Crow, and I think Bill feels like he is a successor to that.”
The teaser poster for the film, heavily inspired by O’Barr’s cover for the first issue, has also been released:
