The Crow Remake Could Have Been Better With A Key Change To Its Protagonist
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
This article contains spoilers for The Crow.
Now that The Crow remake has come and bombed it’s time to address a critical element missing to all Crow reboot discourse: Shelly Webster should get a turn as The Crow.
No, the rotating avenger brought back from beyond the grave isn’t called “The Crow,” per se, but as a superhero fan shorthand, and for general populous purposes, it stands as a moniker. And, simply put, there needs to be a version of this story where the doomed Shelly returns to inflict a violent reckoning on those who took her life and the life of her beloved Eric Draven.
2024’s version of The Crow came into the world kicking and screaming, only to be pushed from a moving car come release time. Enduring years of “development hell,” and uproar over the very idea of a Crow remake (most of which was out of respect and reverence for late star), this new Crow holds barely a trace of the 1994 Brandon Lee film or the James O’Barr comic that film’s based on. So given that the only true connective tissues aside from an un(re)killable vigilante are the names Eric and Shelly, 2024’s version is basically just a Crow saga story and not a re-do. Much like The Crow: City of Angels and the other two films that followed which featured new characters and a new undead avenger.
Thirty years removed from the original Crow-era, enough time had past from both Brandon Lee’s tragic final bow and O’Barr’s personal, pivotal, violent saga of rage and grief for something new to be done with the concept. For one thing, the character of Eric Draven, specifically, shouldn’t have been involved. He wasn’t needed. And since the new movie, thankfully, features barely any echoes of the original tale, you can make a bunch of mental backflips so that this “Eric,” played by Bill Skarsgard, wasn’t meant to evoke Eric Prime at all. In fact, if you just pretend the two leads are named Josh and Wendy, 2024’s Crow is a half-decent Crow franchise entry and arguably better than The Crow: City of Angels, which actually was a sequel and way more of a beat-for-beat remake of the 1994 film than this new film ever was.
But since, for whatever reason, care was taken in making sure Skarsgard and FKA Twigs’ characters were named Eric Draven and Shelly Webster, the new Crow’s biggest sin is not being distinguishable. It’s just not different enough to justify itself. There’s no true new take here to warrant a rehash. This should have been the time to give Shelly her day in the dark.
The original Crow was so tethered to O’Barr’s own personal loss that it made sense for Eric to be a surrogate for his pain. But from a story standpoint, there’s no reason why Shelly wouldn’t experience the same sorrow and agony that Eric did, if we’re talking epic soulmates simultaneously losing their lives (and, ipso facto, the only love and light in their miserable worlds). Shelly would have just as much reason to don face paint and complete her goth look with a corvid on her shoulder. We’re just so used to men-driven revenge tales featuring brooding dudes exacting retribution for the loss of their lady that we’re predisposed to think it’s the only template available.
A Crow heroine isn’t a new idea, even. In the 90s, Miramax rejected O’Barr’s pitch for The Crow: The Bride which would’ve followed a woman killed on her wedding day who’s brought back from the great beyond to exact a blood payment. It was clear that a live-action woman Crow was not happening but the continuing comics, however, told a different story. In those pages we’d find hateful heroines in The Crow: Flesh and Blood, The Crow: Hack/Slash-She Wears Shadows, The French Crow, Vols. 4 & 5, and The Crow: Curare (with a story by O’Barr).
This isn’t an unexplored concept among The Crow’s conceptual legacy. And there’s no reason it couldn’t serve as a Crow movie, whether it be an adaptation of one of these comic tales or an original idea. The point here, though, is that if one is specifically attempting to reimagine the first Crow, the OG Eric/Shelly love story, then having Shelly be the cosmic ghoulish punisher was the way to do it. Granted, credit where it’s due, this new Crow movie gave us a Shelly who was an actual character and not just a beautiful flashback.
More scenes between Sofia Shinas’s Shelly and Brandon Lee were meant to be filmed before Lee’s fatal on-set accident but structure-wise, like in the O’Barr comics, their relationship was backstory. 2024’s Crow shows us the entirety of Eric and Shelly’s courtship – from a Crowlie à Deaux style swooning to an unhealthy codependency to their eventual deaths – which helps establish Shelly as a full lead and not just a precious memory. Ultimately, it all still leads to Eric being sent back because…he’s the sadder of the two? (yes, there’s a plot reason why Shelly can’t come back, but in this grand world of make-em-ups a few lines of dialogue could have sprung her from her trappings).
This may all be a moot point now, since The Crow remake is an asterirsk that we’ll all quickly move on from. Like most remakes that draw tons of pre-outrage, it’ll be a meager franchise blip. But this could have been a chance to do something different and notable instead of drab and forgettable. Can you imagine FKA Twigs’ Shelly in place of Eric in the Opera House battle (a brutally excellent part of the film that’s pretty much garnering the only praise)? It would have been amazing. It’s not hard to just shift all of The Crow’s powers over to Shelly, who’d not only be in torment, but also racked with guilt over getting her boyfriend killed. Anyone who’s seen FKA Twigs’ dance moves — from the videos for “Sad Day,” “Video Girl,” and more — knows she can move like a demented marionette (with action chops!).
There are plenty of reasons to tell more Crow stories but honestly there was only one reason to re-tell Eric and Shelly’s cursed romance, and that was to give the bloody vengeance gig to Shelly.
