Director Corin Hardy never got to make The Crow reboot he worked on for years, but he does reference it in his new horror, Whistle. A 21st century adaptation of James O’Barr’s horror-infused comic hero The Crow emerged in 2024, directed by Rupert Sanders. Reviews were mixed (“preposterously dull,” was our own James Harvey’s verdict); ... Whistle and its nod to The Crow reboot we’ll never see
Director Corin Hardy never got to make The Crow reboot he worked on for years, but he does reference it in his new horror, Whistle.
A 21st century adaptation of James O’Barr’s horror-infused comic hero The Crow emerged in 2024, directed by Rupert Sanders. Reviews were mixed (“preposterously dull,” was our own James Harvey’s verdict); cinema ticket sales were moribund.
What readers may recall is that, for several years, British director Corin Hardy was attached to his own take on The Crow – a shadowy revenge saga first brought to the screen by Alex Proyas (and starring the late Brandon Lee) in 1994.
Hardy’s version was due to star Jason Momoa as Eric Draven, the hero slain by thugs and resurrected by supernatural forces as The Crow. The production saw a number of false starts due to financial problems at Relativity Media, but Hardy continued with the project from 2014 right up until June 2018, when the film was weeks away from beginning its shoot in Budapest.
Then, reportedly due to creative differences, Hardy and Momoa both left the production; on Instagram, Hardy wrote, “We came SO close. But sometimes, when you love something so much, you have to make hard decisions. And yesterday, deciding it was time to let go of this dark and emotional dream project, was the hardest decision of all.”
Speaking to Film Stories in advance of his new horror film, Whistle, Hardy describes those years as a “long story,” and it’s clear that The Crow was a project rooted in his personal affection for the comic book and its horror tone.
“That was my kind of superhero,” he says. “I grew up on James O’Barr’s graphic novel, and Alex Proyas’ movie was such a special thing for me, as an art student and teenager and heavy metal fan. So when I got a chance to do The Crow, it was first of all, very ‘No.’
“Part of me was like, ‘Well no one should do The Crow. It’s a sacred thing.’ But James O’Barr’s graphic novel was the key to me taking that on, to putting a few long, long years into that movie.”
Whistle, due for release in UK cinemas this week, is a delightfully nasty saga in the mould of Final Destination. It sees a group of disaffected small town teenagers fall under the curse of an ancient musical instrument, which kills its victims in increasingly elaborate ways. Dafne Keen leads the cast, while Sky Yang plays her immediately likeable cousin, Rel.
Something of an outsider, Rel is often seen reading a comic book called Revenger, who’s a distinctly familiar-looking supernatural vigilante. At a harvest festival one night, Rel also dresses up as the character, wearing a long coat and facepaint. When we ask whether the Revenger is Hardy’s nod to The Crow, he concedes that it was.
“You’re the first to notice, so congratulations,” he says. “Rel is a kind of outsider, comic book nerd. He’s basically me when I was 14, 15.”
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Hardy then revealed that as originally written, Rel was imagined as a fan of the Green Lantern comics.
“When he goes to the harvest fest, he was going to dress as Green Lantern,” Hardy says. “I’m not a massive Green Lantern fan. And so my initial instinct was, ‘Oh, can he be The Crow, actually?”
As it turned out, the production couldn’t get the rights to Green Lantern, or another character Hardy suggested: the Punisher. Instead, the team came up with their own original superhero, designed as an affectionate echo of those comic book vigilantes.
“We couldn’t get clearance of use for Marvel characters and things like that, so I was like, we can just invent our own. And by that point, with Rel’s character arc, it made more sense that he needed something vengeful, rather than colourful, green spandex or something. So we designed this character and managed to get clearance on the name the Revenger. [He’s] inspired by Punisher, inspired by The Crow. Sky Yang, who plays Rel, when we did a camera test, I was like, ‘He looks fantastic.’ He really brought the Revenger to life.”
For Hardy, this moment in Whistle was his chance to playfully reference his teenage affection for The Crow – and the lost film adaptation we’ll sadly never get to see.
“I loved the visual aspect, that he [Rel] was going to harvest fest dressed in this gear,” Hardy says. “Because I used to go out dressed as The Crow virtually every Halloween aged around 15 to 20.”
Whistle is in UK cinemas from the 13th February.
