When ‘The Crow‘ hit theaters in 1994, it didn’t just feel like another comic-book adaptation; it felt like a mood that had been set to film. The film, directed by Alex Proyas and adapted from the graphic novel of the same title, authored by James O’Barr, came soaked in rain, leather, and sorrow.
It was gothic without being ironic and violent without being apologetic. It was emotionally honest in a manner that genre films could hardly afford to be in the early 1990s. To a lot of viewers, particularly Gen-X viewers, ‘The Crow’ was not merely a film. It was a soundtrack, a fashion statement, and a kind of catharsis.
How ‘The Crow’ Nearly Reinvented Itself
‘The Crow’s legacy cannot be separated from tragedy. The accidental death of Brandon Lee on the set permanently tints the project with a dark cloud, making the film haunted, both literally and figuratively. The thought of a sequel was awkward, even sickening, after that tragedy, but Hollywood instincts are insatiable. A cult hit, no matter how sacred, will eventually be asked to continue.
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What is easily lost is that ‘The Crow’ nearly did not turn out to be a franchise at all. In its earliest sequel discussions, it was poised to take bold creative risks that might have reshaped not just the series but how genre franchises approached legacy, grief, and reinvention. When studios tried to to see whether they could do a follow-up, writer David S. Goyer was left with a challenging question: how do you continue a story so deeply tied to a performance that can never be replicated?
So, instead of simply replacing Eric Draven, he turned to the emotional heart of the first movie, Sarah, the young girl who was the narrator and witness to Eric’s transformation. In ‘The Crow’, Sarah was a symbol of innocence that survived in a violent world. Goyer wondered how time would overtake her. His response was to envision Sarah as an adult, a person who has been traumatized, memory-filled, and survived. This idea later found its way, albeit in part, into ‘The Crow: City of Angels’, where Sarah is shown several years later as a tattoo artist caught in another resurrection narrative.
However, that version was merely a compromise. Goyer’s more radical thought was to make Sarah herself the Crow. “I wanted to have a female Crow in the second film, and I wanted it to be Sarah. I thought that would be the most interesting kind of twist, to have a female Crow. And no one could make any comparisons to Brandon Lee if the character was female,” he stated. This direction was apparently seen by both Goyer and James O’Barr. It would have enabled The Crow to develop instead of copying itself. Unfortunately, evolution is rarely Hollywood’s first instinct.
Goyer Wanted ‘The Crow’ To Team Up With Jack The Ripper
If the idea of a female Crow felt daring, Goyer’s other proposal was downright audacious. Instead of propelling the story forward, he envisioned going backward with it, all the way to Victorian England. His setting was a gaslit, foggy London at the end of the 19th century, in which a revived Crow would roam the streets with Jack the Ripper. It was an idea that combined gothic horror, proto-steampunk aesthetics, and historical myth long before such combinations became trendy.
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“My second idea was to do a ‘Gaslight Crow,’ a movie that took place in Victorian England, where I was going to pit the Victorian Crow up against Jack the Ripper,” he explained. The idea made thematic sense. The emotional world of ‘The Crow’ was perfectly reflected in Victorian London with its moral hypocrisy, social decay, and death-obsession. A near-supernatural agent of violence and terror, Jack the Ripper would have been a chilling villain, not merely a murderer to be prevented, but a symbol of the worst in human nature.
This adaptation of ‘The Crow’ would have made the character a universal character, a ghost that appears where injustice thrives. It would have liberated the franchise from the visual and cultural baggage and re-packaged it as more of a folklore. But again, boldness lost out to familiarity. Fearing losing viewers, studio executives insisted on a sequel that would resemble and feel like the first one. The outcome was ‘City of Angels’, a movie that was torn between ambition and obligation, not knowing whether to recreate or recycle.
