Question: How do you remake a cult classic for the 21st century? Answer: Not like this. Here's everything that went wrong with 2024's The Crow.
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00:00Question, how do you remake a cult classic for the 21st century?
00:04Answer?
00:05Not like this.
00:06Here's everything that went wrong with 2024's The Crow.
00:10In mid-March 2024, Lionsgate dropped the first trailer for The Crow.
00:14Instantly, the marketing campaign for this remake got off on the wrong foot.
00:18The moody trailer confirmed this remake would cover the same storytelling terrain of the
00:22original movie and emphasized lots of R-rated violence.
00:26Immediately, the press expressed disdain for the project.
00:28While the first trailer for The Crow remake secured over 91,000 dislikes a few days after
00:33its launch, it was a staggering turn of events that instantly cast a grim aura over the entire
00:38production.
00:39In the months that followed, Lionsgate struggled to stir anticipation for The Crow.
00:43Part of the problem came from the small scale of the studio's promotional campaign.
00:47The studio reportedly spent only $15 million on marketing the feature, just slightly over
00:5310 percent of the promotional budget for Deadpool and Wolverine.
00:55Let's give the people what they came for!
00:58The meager marketing spend meant that even seemingly no-brainer promotional tie-ins for
01:02The Crow went unexploited.
01:03Most notably, the 2024 edition of the San Diego International Comic-Con featured no
01:08Crow panels or photo opportunities.
01:11All in all, nothing about Lionsgate's The Crow marketing screamed confidence, meaning
01:15audiences found it much easier to give the movie the cold shoulder.
01:19When the idea for a Crow remake first emerged, Mark Wahlberg's name was attached as a contender
01:24for the lead part.
01:25Wahlberg didn't last long in the role, but several other actors would later be eyeballed
01:29as a replacement.
01:30In fact, the titular role of The Crow became something of a revolving door, through which
01:34various leading men walked in and out during the 2010s.
01:37Bradley Cooper, Tom Hiddleston, and Jason Momoa, among many others, were connected to
01:41the part at some point in time.
01:43The 1994 version of The Crow had been meant to launch Brandon Lee as a movie star.
01:48In sharp contrast, the initial plan for the remake was to merge the property with a red-hot
01:52leading man.
01:53Towards the end, the role went to Bill Skarsgård, who was previously best known for playing
01:57Pennywise the Clown in It Chapter 1 and Chapter 2.
02:00While those movies were smash hits, Skarsgård himself would freely admit he's not a box
02:06office draw.
02:07Supporting Skarsgård was famous musician FKA Twigs and character actor Danny Houston,
02:12a few recognizable faces featured in the rest of the cast.
02:15Certainly, nobody in The Crow was famous enough to help overcome the movie's shoddy marketing
02:19campaign.
02:21The very first rumblings of a straightforward Crow remake began in 2008.
02:25Just three years after the last direct-to-video sequel to the original film, The Crow Wicked
02:29Prayer hit the marketplace.
02:31At this point in time, The Crow was still relatively fresh in people's minds.
02:34It was also an era in which the superhero movie marketplace was still far from peak
02:38capacity.
02:39That's a radically different pop culture landscape to the one that The Crow finally entered in
02:43August 2024, however.
02:45By the time the remake opened, it had been over three decades since the original Crow
02:49premiered, and nearly two decades since the last Crow movie.
02:52The iron hadn't just cooled on the Crow brand name, it had gone arctic cold.
02:56That fact appeared to evade Lionsgate's marketing team, however.
02:59The abysmal campaign for The Crow leaned too heavily on the pre-existing brand name, with
03:04many of the posters and TV spots merely establishing that a new Crow movie was on the horizon.
03:09Some franchises can get away with simply leaning on a familiar logo, and perhaps that promotional
03:13approach would have been enough back in 2011 or 2012.
03:17But the 2024 Crow remake needed to do more to get people's attention, given how much
03:21the franchise had fallen out of fashion.
03:24There was once a time when R-rated movies stood out in the PG-13-dominated blockbuster
03:29marketplace.
03:30Just look at summer 2013, when The Conjuring distinguished itself in a sea of PG-13 hits.
03:35Summer 2024, however, has been packed to the gills with R-rated tentpoles.
03:39Bad Boys, Ride or Die, Alien Romulus, and especially Deadpool and Wolverine have been
03:44among the biggest box office hits of the season.
03:46This meant that The Crow couldn't promote itself as the one big bloody action movie
03:50in a season of sanitized family-friend fare.
03:53Instead, to the unconverted, The Crow felt like more of the same.
03:56More pressingly, the movie's August 23 release date placed it in direct competition with
04:00summer 2024's biggest R-rated movies.
04:04Alien Romulus, for example, opened just one week earlier, partially satisfying the public's
04:08appetite for graphically violent chaos.
04:11I can't lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies."
04:17The real fatal blow, though, was Deadpool and Wolverine, which topped the domestic box
04:21office despite being in its fifth week of release.
04:24Honestly, The Crow was always going to struggle to bring in audiences.
04:27This became all the more challenging, however, when it debuted into a marketplace in which
04:31a more lighthearted and better-reviewed movie also promised a ton of R-rated superhero carnage.
04:37The original Crow has become an object of deep personal affection for many 90s kids,
04:42and this cult following spans demographics beyond just film and comic book geeks.
04:46I wish the rain would stop just once.
04:49It can't rain all the time.
04:51For instance, the original movie is revered for its influence on the metal and punk music
04:55scenes.
04:56Meanwhile, folks growing up in the goth sub-community were fond of the film for providing a rare
05:00gothic hero in an era of cinema that mostly used their subculture as a punchline.
05:05Then, of course, there's a reverence for the film's late star, Brandon Lee, who was accidentally
05:09shot and killed during filming.
05:11That tragedy has led many modern retrospectives of The Crow to highlight Lee's remarkable
05:15work in the title role.
05:17Remakes are a dime a dozen in Hollywood, but something felt extra macabre about this one,
05:21given the material's permanent intertwining with Lee's personal life.
05:25It didn't help that the marketing for the 2024 Crow made the film look sanitized and
05:30mainstream, a sharp contrast to the way the original feature resonated deeply with grimy
05:34subcultures.
05:35This new Crow was supposed to ride brand name familiarity to box office glory.
05:40Instead, people's love for the original movie just made it harder to sell a new version
05:44of the story.
05:46In the days leading up to The Crow's release, a particularly bizarre element of its marketing
05:50campaign emerged.
05:51Lionsgate didn't allow official reviews to drop for the movie until 4 p.m. Pacific Time
05:55on August 22nd.
05:57That meant many Thursday preview screenings for The Crow were well underway by the time
06:01critics could publish their reviews of the film.
06:03It was a strange measure that not only signaled minimal studio confidence in the project but
06:08also meant that there was no opportunity for The Crow to drum up buzz before opening day.
06:12To Lionsgate executives, the prospect of The Crow becoming a critical punching bag before
06:17release may have sounded like a nightmare.
06:19However, it's worth remembering that there's no such thing as bad publicity.
06:22Even a deluge of bad reviews two days before release could have inspired some social media
06:26chatter about The Crow.
06:28Perhaps it would have even motivated a few moviegoers to plunk down money for tickets
06:32in the name of hate-watching.
06:33Instead, the conversation surrounding the movie was totally dead leading up to those
06:37first public screenings.
06:39The only Crow-related discourse that actually came about related to a weird promotional
06:43double standard in which influencers were allegedly allowed to talk about the feature
06:47before critics.
06:49In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, several intriguing theatrical moviegoing trends have
06:53emerged.
06:54One especially important trend is that Gen Z moviegoers have become the most important
06:58audience for studios to pursue.
07:00These avid movie theater attendees have fueled some of the biggest post-2021 box office hits
07:05domestically.
07:06Basically, if you want a lucrative feature film in 2024, you'd better appeal to folks
07:10under the age of 30.
07:11That demo's prominence in modern moviegoing was reflected in the fact that 58 percent
07:15of the opening weekend audience of The Crow landed in the 18-to-34 age range.
07:20However, the film's lack of appeal to a broader range of younger audiences clearly limited
07:24its box office potential.
07:26Bill Skarsgård isn't a beloved heartthrob on TikTok, and FKA Twigs is nowhere near famous
07:31enough with college-aged audiences to carry a whole movie.
07:34Plus, The Crow brand name is practically unknown to younger moviegoers, and nothing in the
07:38marketing campaign made the film appear relevant to young people, like, say, the trailers for
07:42Challengers did.
07:43Even the use of gothic aesthetics in the posters and trailers felt out of step with the modern
07:47punk and emo scenes.
07:48In courting the nostalgia of moviegoers, The Crow failed to utilize a demographic that's
07:53proven critical for any box office phenomenon since 2021.
07:57The biggest domestic movie of the 2020s so far was Spider-Man No Way Home, which scored
08:02a mighty $800 million, plus haul, in the United States.
08:06But while No Way Home flourished financially, superhero movies in general have had a rocky
08:12track record this decade, compared to the last.
08:14A slew of high-profile, costly bombs have plagued the once-untouchable Marvel and DC
08:19brands.
08:20Like the costly 2023 duds The Marvels and The Flash, both of which failed to match even
08:25the domestic opening weekends of prior Marvel and DC titles with their total box office
08:30grosses.
08:31This was the unpredictable box office landscape into which The Crow soared.
08:34When the concept of remaking The Crow was first bandied about, making a superhero movie
08:38mostly meant printing your own money, unless you were very unlucky.
08:42This reboot, however, entered a marketplace where even new Marvel Studios titles can struggle
08:46to match box office expectations.
08:49Even with Deadpool and Wolverine killing it financially, the erratic track record of 2020s
08:54superhero movies remains, which can't have made things much easier for The Crow.
08:58Sometimes word of mouth can save a movie after a poor opening weekend.
09:02If audiences really like what they see, positive buzz can spread like wildfire and ensure that
09:06a release gains ground after an underwhelming bow.
09:09It's a very rare phenomenon, but the likes of Elemental and The Greatest Showman have
09:13shown that it can happen.
09:15After a dismal opening day box office performance, the producers of The Crow were likely praying
09:20that this might happen to them, too.
09:22Unfortunately, the opening night cinema score for The Crow sealed the movie's fate.
09:26Audiences gave the movie a disappointing B- grade.
09:29If there's any sliver of an upside for The Crow, it'd be that it didn't receive the worst
09:33cinema score for a 2024 superhero movie.
09:36That honor belongs to the C-plus score slapped on Madame Web back in February.
09:39However, a B- cinema score puts The Crow in disastrous company in terms of superhero movie
09:45word of mouth, with the infamous Bombdog Phoenix receiving the same grade in June 2019.
09:50April 2022's Morbius, meanwhile, got a similar C-plus grade from audiences.
09:54"...I'm starting to get hungry, and you don't want to see me when I'm hungry."
10:00All these earlier titles suffered catastrophic second-weekend plummets, with those cinema
10:04scores indicating immense audience displeasure that warned off other moviegoers.
10:08With such a disastrous response, the word of mouth for The Crow prevented the movie
10:13from making a last-minute escape from box office hell.
10:16The Crow confirmed a brutal Hollywood truth.
10:18If you want to launch a lucrative superhero movie, don't distribute it through Lionsgate.
10:22The studio has proven incredibly successful at launching the John Wick, Hunger Games,
10:27and Saw franchises, but its box office track record with superhero films is truly awful.
10:32The studio has distributed a litany of infamous superhero feature flops, ranging from The
10:36Spirit to the 2019 Hellboy boondoggle to 2017's costly Power Rangers bomb.
10:42Only April 2010's low-budget hit Kick-Ass proved to be an exception to this rule.
10:46Otherwise, Lionsgate's superhero fare seems doomed to fail.
10:50Lionsgate's main problem with launching superhero movies is that the studio typically acquires
10:54and releases titles based on superheroes who have already had big-screen adventures.
10:58Hellboy, Power Rangers, The Crow — these are all characters that had previously famous
11:02cinematic incarnations.
11:03It's no surprise that Lionsgate's closest thing to a hit superhero movie was Kick-Ass,
11:08which adapted a character who had never before been seen on the big screen.
11:12Otherwise, trying to wring hits out of familiar brands has never been a recipe for success
11:16by Lionsgate, dating back to the days of Punisher, Warzone.
11:19The Crow would probably have never made bank, even with Disney-level distribution, but Lionsgate's
11:24cursed handling of the superhero genre certainly did it no favors.