They say you should never go back. It’s true in football. Look at Howard Kendall’s second spell at Everton. It’s true in marriage, if Richard Burton and Liz Taylor are any sort of yardstick. But is it true in cinema?
The long-time Hollywood producer Edward Pressman, who is being honoured with a career achievement award at the 2014 Abu Dhabi Film Festival, presumably hopes not.
In an interview at the International Showbiz Expo in Abu Dhabi this week, Pressman told The National exclusively that his reboot of the 1994 undead superhero movie The Crow, whose star Brandon Lee died in an on-set accident, is set to go into production in spring of 2015.
“We’re doing a new Crow film. We’re doing a whole reinvention of The Crow, which will be starting next spring. It’s developed. We have the script. We can’t say who’s starring in it, but we have one. It starts shooting in the spring.”
Goths around the world can rejoice in unison.
The veteran producer, who was behind the original, is no stranger to comic book and fantasy movie adaptations, having produced Judge Dredd (1995), Conan The Barbarian (1982) and Masters of the Universe (1994).
Pressman wouldn't say who's starring in the movie, but its existence has been rumoured for a long time now, and at least one actor at January's BAFTAs seemed fairly certain of who is starring in the reboot, if less so of when it would happen. The actor was The Hobbit star Luke Evans, and the elusive star was, err, Luke Evans.
Evans, who is currently packing out cinemas in Dracula Untold, was asked by Red Carpet TV at the London ceremony in January how pre-production of the movie was going, and replied: "Well, we just want to be as authentic and loyal to the original comic as possible, and that means the story will be different. It'll be different from what people are expecting. It's not about us ripping off the Brandon Lee movie. That stands alone as a brilliant piece of cult film and a great performance, but we're going back to the book, the original book. And that's exciting because we're bringing to the screen a lot of parts of the story that were never really told. So yeah, it's our chance to do it, to do it differently, but to be as loyal and respectful of the original storyline as we possibly can."
At the end of September the Welshman told Wales Onlinethe shoot "was supposed to begin this year and didn't happen. To be honest with you, it's out of my hands. I'm happy to do the film and I'm ready to do it. It's funny because they announced it about a year ago and I think some fans were a little unhappy about it being remade, and some were thinking I wasn't the right person, but now everyone's asking me about it."
Of course, successful comic books are notoriously difficult to adapt without ruffling feathers among the existing fan base. The Crow is an even more difficult proposition since the star of the 1994 original, Brandon Lee, died in an on-set accident in the final stages of filming. Brandon was the son of martial arts movie legend Bruce Lee, who himself died during post-production of Enter the Dragon, leading to a million unlikely online conspiracy theories post-Crow.
For Pressman, while not quite a matter of life and death, the 1994 film marks a pivotal moment in his career.
"When Brandon Lee died on the last day of shooting The Crow we had a choice: collect insurance or continue when all the foreign distributors dropped the film," he says. "We ended up having to finance a movie that would have destroyed us if it hadn't succeeded. We continued to finance the movie ourselves with no safety net. That was a risky period, but I wanted to finish the film. I knew we had something. [Lee] would have been a superstar."
