FLASHBACK
Why ‘The Crow’ — and Brandon Lee — Still Haunts Us
The 1994 cult film may be remembered for its behind-the-scenes tragedy, but it's also a testament to the charismatic star at the center of it
“When someone’s dead, they can’t come back, can they?”
It’s a pretty straightforward line of dialogue. But when it was spoken near the end of The Crow, audiences silently shivered. All of us who saw the anticipated comic-book action movie when it opened on the weekend of May 13th, 1994, understood that the line was in reference to the film’s main character, Eric Draven. He was a burgeoning rock star who miraculously comes back to life a year after he and his fiancée are murdered in cold blood by local thugs, with his resurrection allowing him to avenge their deaths. But that question ended up having a more poignant dimension than the filmmakers had never intended. Eric was played by Brandon Lee, a rising star who died during an on-set accident. No one who watched this adaptation of James O’Barr’s comics could ignore the terrible real-world parallels to its fictional scenario. Here was a film about a slain young man given a second chance, featuring a slain young man who would never receive such an opportunity. Cruelly, life isn’t like the movies.
This weekend, after years of false starts, a new version of The Crow will hit theaters. Insisting that the 2024 film, which stars Bill Skarsgård, is not a remake, director Rupert Sanders has talked about taking his inspiration more from O’Barr’s original graphic novel. In our nonstop reboot/reimagining film culture, it’s common for Hollywood to gussy up its cynical recycling of intellectual property by claiming that the movies are going back to the source material. In the case of this new Crow, however, that strategy is also partly a sign of tactfulness. The 1994 movie was a sleeper hit and a cult classic, but it also carries with it the dark legacy of its star’s passing. By not copying that film directly, Sanders can create a little distance from that tragedy. Nonetheless, 30 years later, Lee’s senseless death hovers over this material. Sadder still, it’s merely one heartbreak associated with The Crow — and not even the first.
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In 1981, O’Barr, now 64, was living in Berlin, grieving the death of his fiancée, who had been killed by a drunk driver. A former Marine dreaming of a career in comics, he unraveled in the face of unimaginable loss. Out of desperation, he channeled his sorrow into art.
“I was being too self-destructive in my life and I needed to do something like get it down on paper or something or I was going to end up dead,” O’Barr said in 2000, later adding, “I worked on it off and on for, like, six years in 15-to-20 page increments. It was really difficult to work on. It was painful to go back to that. I never really thought about selling it. It was more for myself.”
Although plot points changed when it was adapted into the 1994 film, O’Barr’s The Crow was, essentially, the same idea: Eric and his fiancée Shelly are murdered, he is revived by a crow, and he goes on a killing spree to get back at those who took their lives. O’Barr tried to shop the idea, but he got few offers. “I sent it out to virtually every publisher that was out there,” he recalled in that 2000 interview. “No one was interested in it. Either they all said it was too violent or not violent enough. It’s too depressing, it’s too moody. Nobody wanted it. So I put it on the shelf and thought it would be a personal project.”
Eventually, though, The Crow was published in 1989, becoming such a success that Hollywood came calling. In the wake of Tim Burton’s Batman — the summer blockbuster that reconceived the comic-book film, making it funkier, darker and hipper — a movie featuring a gloomy superhero driven by vengeance seemed like a potential hit. It took a while, though, to get the pieces together. One early idea was to adapt The Crow into a Michael Jackson musical. Later, Christian Slater and Johnny Depp were reportedly briefly considered to play Eric.
Then came Brandon Lee, who was starting to make his name as an action star, pursuing the same career as that of his legendary father, Bruce Lee. Brandon was only eight when the martial-arts master died at the age of 32 from a cerebral edema. He loved his dad, but he didn’t want to become him, which was never more apparent than when he turned down the possibility of playing him in a biopic, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. “As far as following in his footsteps go, if one means by that, ‘Would I like to achieve the same level of excellence that he did?’ Yes, of course I would, in any field,” Brandon once said. “But does it mean I want to imitate him, in any way, shape or form? No, because imitation, it’s pale. … And besides which, we’re just different people.”
Brandon Lee impressed director Alex Proyas with his approach to Eric, understanding the unique opportunity this character had been given. On March 19th, 1993, shortly before his death, Lee spoke about The Crow’s deeper themes. “[Y]ou tend to take a great deal for granted, because you feel like you’re going to live forever,” he said. “It’s only if you lose a friend, or maybe have a near-death experience, [that] many events and people in your life suddenly attain real significance. When you take into account the fact that that could have been the last time I would ever see that person [or] do something so mundane as go out to dinner…. This is [where] this character is coming from. [He realizes] how precious each moment of his life is.” No doubt his own father’s passing affected his mindset. But Lee had no idea his own death was so imminent.
On March 30th, near the end of The Crow’s production, Lee was filming a scene in which his character is killed by criminals who also murder his love Shelly (Sofia Shinas). For the fateful scene, actor Michael Massee, who played one of the crooks, fired a gun with blanks at Lee. But as the New York Times reported later, “the gunpowder in the blank cartridge ignited and fired a fragment of a bullet — probably part of a dummy shell that had been left in the gun’s barrel from an earlier scene — into Mr. Lee’s midsection. Mr. Lee collapsed and after hours of surgery, died in a hospital.” He was only 28, buried alongside his father.
Lee’s death was horrible enough, but there was an extra layer of stark irony: He and his fiancée, Eliza Hutton, were due to be married shortly after production wrapped. James O’Barr, who had created The Crow out of his own grief, was sickened by the sense of déjà vu. “When Brandon died I had a very, very hard time,” he admitted around the time of the film’s release. “The feelings of guilt and responsibility were enormous. The similarities of his death and Eric’s death in the book are so close that it almost lends itself to a supernatural interpretation. Brandon was killed filming the scene in which Eric is killed. In the film and book, this occurs on the eve of Eric’s wedding. … People were saying that it was destined to be — that it was fate.”
What was meant to be Lee’s big break after years of making low-budget B-movies ended up being his swan song, with Proyas and the writers cobbling together workarounds for the scenes he had not yet filmed. (Stunt double Chad Stahelski, who went on to direct the John Wick films, served as Lee’s stand-in for the new scenes.) In October 1993, Lee’s mother Linda Lee Cadwell settled a negligence lawsuit with the production, an undisclosed sum going to both her and Hutton, and the following year, The Crow landed at No. 2 in its opening weekend, behind the romantic drama When a Man Loves a Woman.
A film starring a deceased actor is a rare, awful thing, and naturally much of the attention at the time was focused on Lee’s death. But over the years, The Crow’s legacy grew beyond that sad fact. In the mid-1990s, superhero films were going through a period of transformation: On one end, you had the big, splashy summer tentpoles like Batman Forever, while on the other, you had grungier flicks like The Crow, which modeled themselves off the edgy graphic novels that spawned them. Gritty late-’90s comic-book movies, such as Spawn and Blade, took a page from Lee’s film, which was about a sarcastic, mournful hero driven by his darker impulses. The sunny positivity of Christopher Reeve’s Superman cinema was long gone, replaced by jet-black pessimism.
That spirit was reflected not just in The Crow’s tone but also its look and soundtrack. Shot by Dariusz Wolski, who in recent years has become Ridley Scott’s go-to cinematographer, the film seemed to exist in a world of perpetual rain. Before The Matrix popularized trench-coat chic, for better or worse, the morose outcast Eric paraded through Detroit’s dank streets in similar garb. With his leaner-than-usual physique, Lee resembled the goth and alternative rock kids whose music was the coolest, most dangerous sound of the era. Lee’s white face paint mimicked that of Robert Smith, frontman of the Cure, who were on the soundtrack — and from the back, with his long black hair, naked torso, and leather pants, Lee could have been confused with Nine Inch Nails head honcho Trent Reznor, who contributed a cover of Joy Division’s “Dead Souls.” (Perhaps as a nod to the 1994 film’s indelible industrial/hard-rock songs, Joy Division are featured in the new movie.)
Those nods to the musical fashions of the era made The Crow iconic — a time capsule of pre-emo sensitivity and despair — but none of it would have mattered without Lee. Where other action heroes and comic-book crime fighters were buff brutes, his Eric was a slender figure, his almost feminine looks giving this avenging angel a vulnerability that was rare in the genre. For fans who went to watch The Crow to grieve, there were plenty of reasons to feel sad and queasy when his invincible character keeps getting shot and stabbed, the violence doing nothing to slow him down. But Lee also left in room for Eric to be joyous, taking morose delight in his unusual circumstance. There were even moments of unexpected triumph, like when Ernie Hudson’s diligent cop points a gun at Eric, telling him, “You move, you’re dead.” Grinning while walking toward him, Eric blithely replies, “And I say, I’m dead … and I move.” Originally, it would have been just a throwaway line, but in the face of Lee’s passing, it felt defiant, ebullient. Lee was never going to come back, but the performance expressed his vitality and wit.
There were forgettable sequels and, later, attempts to remake the 1994 film. Rob Zombie was going to direct a version at one point. At other times, Bradley Cooper or Jason Momoa were slated to play Eric. Frankly, it seemed a bit ghoulish to revisit the material, especially after the 2021 on-set accidental fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during the making of Rust, which brought back terrible memories of Lee’s death. But The Crow’s story is simply too alluring, its promise that true love is stronger than the grave romantic and seductive, even reassuring.
Especially in light of Hutchins’ passing, the people behind the new version would understandably want to do everything they can to distance themselves from the 1994 film. But that’s simply impossible. Watch The Crow now, and you see an actor who was just starting out, eager to prove himself and escape the shadow of a father he adored. “If the people we love are stolen from us,” the movie’s closing voiceover suggests, “the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them.” Supposedly, Lee had worried that he’d died young like his dad — a fear that, sadly, came true. We’ll never know what Brandon Lee might have achieved in his career. But The Crow, a film about trying to defeat death, will always serve as a reminder of what he was capable of. Anyone who remembers the 1994 movie has never stopped loving him in it.