Bill Skarsgard Dons The Crow Makeup In First Images For Remake

Bill Skarsgard will wear the monochromatic facepaint of the dead Eric Draven brought back to life to seek out revenge. Unlike the other Crow movies, this will be a remake of the 1994 film starring Brandon Lee and Vanity Fair has your first look at Skarsgard in full gear.

In the wake of Tim Burton’s Batman, a slew of comic book movie adaptations flooded the big screen. While 1990’s Teenage mutant Ninja Turtles, from New Line, may have been to a hit outside of the Batman films, The Crow also made quite the impact, based on the James O’Barr comic. While the new reboot had done away with the tattered bodysuit of Lee’s Draven, the trenchcoat remains on Skarsgard’s shredded and tattooed-up torso.

Director Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman) said he wanted to see more of the love story between Eric and his tragic love Shelly to make their story something audiences can resonate more with.

“What drew me to this was the opportunity to make a dark romance, something that dealt with loss, grief, and the ethereal veil between life and death and reaching through that,” said Sanders. “Look, I grew up listening to Joy Division and the Cure, and this movie is a bit like a Cure song–the beauty of melancholy.”

It’s been 30 years since the first Crow film and with Lee’s untimely and tragic on-set death, a long-running franchise was born out of those ashes with the mantle passing to Ashe Corven (Vincent Perez), Alex Corvis (Eric Mabius), and Jimmy Cuervo (Edward Furlong). Mark Dacascos played Eric on the short-lived television series The Crow: Stairway to Heaven.

Sanders wanted to make clear this is less of a remake and more of a reimagining. He considers it a completely different take than what O’Barr created but also wanted to memorialize Lee’s memory.

“Obviously, it was a terrible tragedy, and it’s definitely something that we’ve always had in mind through the making of the film,” Sanders added. “Brandon was an original voice and I think he will always be synonymous with The Crow and I hope he’s proud of what we’ve done and how we’ve brought the story back again. His soul is very much alive in this film. There’s a real fragility and beauty to his version of the Crow, and I think Bill feels like he is a successor to that.”

The Crow opens nationwide on June 7.