Movies
UPDATED: ‘The Crow’ Hires A New Writer And Director!
Updated 6:05PST – F. Javier Gutierrez (Before The Fall) has been hired to direct. Press release below the jump.
Yesterday I posted an article about the upcoming remake of The Crow.
A press release had stated, “The lawsuit between Relativity Media and The Weinstein Company concerning THE CROW has been amicably settled out of court, and the parties will continue to work on the film together as planned.”
At the end of the article I speculated that since the project didn’t have a writer (or director) that it could still be a long way off. Well, it appears that Relativity and TWC have hit the ground running after settling this legal business because a writer has now been hired – Jesse Wigutow.
Per Deadline, “Jesse Wigutow is making a deal to write the script. The original was distributed by the Weinsteins at Miramax back in 1994 and grossed $50.6M domestic. Wigutow has ‘Irreparable Harm’ set up at HBO Films, just rewrote Robert Ludlum’s ‘The Osterman Weekend’ for Summit, and has ‘Age Inappropriate’ with Offspring at Universal. He recently scripted a Steve McQueen biopic for Cross Creek’s’ Brian Oliver, based on the book Steve McQueen: Portrait of an American Rebel.”
So there’s that! Perhaps this thing gets rolling sooner rather than later, though I’m not really looking forward to it. “Relativity Media’s Co-President, Tucker Tooley, Edward R. Pressman, producer behind the cult-classic The Crow franchise, and The Weinstein Company’s Dimension Films, announced today they have closed a deal with F. Javier Gutiérrez (Before The Fall) to direct a reinvention of The Crow, the 1994 smash hit film based on the comic book series and comic strip by James O’Barr. Writer Jesse Wigutow has signed on to pen the script.”
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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