A Life Through Film #031: The Crow: City of Angels
The worst producers in Hollywood decide to do some graverobbing to thankfully mediocre results
Release Date: 8/30/1996
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
Unfortunately, if you know anything about The Crow, it may only exist in your mind as the tragic coda to an already sad story.
Bruce Lee was a one-of-a-kind talent, a true marvel who was able to combine incredible physical ability with a universal charisma to make some of the most legendary martial arts films of all time. Action classics like Enter the Dragon and The Big Boss legitimately crossed over into mainstream American audiences in the early ‘70s on top of making hundreds of millions of dollars all around the world.
When Lee died in 1973 at the age of 32 as a result of a possible hyponatremia, his absence created a vacuum in Hong Kong action and the general world of cinema that the industry spent decades trying to fill by finding the next great martial arts star. Jackie Chan, who achieved worldwide fame with his own take on the action genre, was initially pegged as the Next Bruce Lee.
One contender for that title ended up being Lee’s own son. Brandon Lee, in an effort to follow his father’s footsteps, began to act in low-budget action flicks as a young man. These movies did okay considering their scale, but in the early ‘90s, he finally had a chance to break out with something bigger.
The Crow was Paramount’s attempt to ride a bit of that Batman success, taking a dark story with its origin in comics and adapting it for the grunge era. The story, which follows a resurrected guitarist who uses his newfound invincibility to seek revenge on the criminal gang that murdered him and his fiancée, allowed Lee to tap into the loss of his father for motivation in the lead role as the titular Crow. Sadly, he never got to see the final product.
On March 31st, 1993, a prop gun misfired a real bullet at Lee during one the actor’s final days of shooting. Ironically, the cast and crew were filming the scene where the actor’s character is initially shot to death. The Son of the Dragon was rushed to a local hospital in North Carolina, but it was too late. Brandon Lee died later that day at the age of 28, less than 20 years after the death of his father.
Unwilling to release a film with such tragedy attached to it, Paramount dropped out, citing concerns with the overly violent content of The Crow in the face of Lee’s death. Miramax, a formerly independent movie studio freshly acquired by Disney, stepped up and not only bought the distribution rights to The Crow, but infused the production with an extra $8 million to pay for rewrites, reedits, and reshoots that made use of body doubles and CG replacements of Lee’s face over a stuntman.1
Now dedicated to its late star, The Crow flew into theaters in May of 1994 and blew everyone away with its success. Despite a relatively small budget of $23 million even after the Miramax bailout and some initial thoughts of going straight to VHS, the bloody superhero thriller pulled in nearly $100 million by the end of its theatrical run. It might be tempting to say a lot of that was based on people wanting to watch the movie where its star was killed during filming, but The Crow truly is more than that grisly reputation.
Despite everything about the movie from its costuming, lighting, and soundtrack immediately tying it to the early ‘90s, it has held up remarkably well. Brandon Lee carries the Crow with a sardonic charm, executing both the great action and the gallows humor with equal aplomb. The script never forces him to consider the negative ramifications of his revenge, allowing us as the audience to take a sick pleasure in how excessively violent his journey becomes. And yet beneath all of the rain, blood, and grime in The Crow lies the seed of hope. the movie itself reflects on the process of moving through grief, which those close to Lee must have been feeling as his final film was finding its audience theaters.
The terrible sadness of loss will fuck you up, the movie says, but it can’t rain all the time.
The Crow is just great [4/5]. This isn’t even nostalgia talking; I only watched it for the first time a couple of months ago. Its influence can still be felt to this day, from its codifying of the ‘90s grunge aesthetic to the clear influence that Brandon Lee’s performance had on Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight (we’ll get there one day. Another sad story, Jesus). The Crow will forever be tied to the freak loss of its star, but it should also be remembered as a remarkable artistic achievement in the face of that loss. That’s a legacy that everyone involved with the movie should be proud of, despite the tragedy they suffered.
Of course, this is Hollywood. No one can ever leave well enough alone.
The Crow: City of Angels is the 1996 sequel to The Crow directed by Tim Pope and written by David S. Goyer. The story follows a new Crow, a man named Ashe who’s mysteriously resurrected to seek revenge on the gang that killed him and his son in a nightmarish vision of Los Angeles. None of the original cast returned for this new standalone tale, and the only character to carry over from the first Crow was Sarah, now aged up about 10 years from a tweenager to the beautiful Mia Kirshner. Now the character gets to have a shower scene and dress in negligees as she dramatically yearns for the Crow. Thanks, Weinsteins!
Yeah, if you weren’t aware, Miramax was founded and for years run by accused sexual harasser Bob Weinstein and his convicted sexual predator brother Harvey. On top of their decades of double-handedly making the movie business a more dangerous place for women, these pieces of shit were also terrible producers as well. Miramax profited handsomely from saving The Crow, so while the tasteful thing to do would be to leave the film as a solitary tribute to its fallen star, there was evidently too much money on the table to abide by good taste. Not that we should be expecting the Weinsteins to ever do the right thing of course.
If the studio asked original Crow director Alex Proyas to come back for the sequel, I can’t find any reporting on it. They at least had the courtesy to go to James O’Barr and asking for ideas though. O’Barr was the creator of the original Crow comic, which he had created as a way to process the grief of losing his fiancée in a hit and run when he was only 18.
The comic creator wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of another Crow movie, especially since he had become friends with Brandon Lee while on the set of the first film. Still, he took the opportunity to try and create something new for the franchise, something so distinct from the first movie that The Crow could stand as a standalone tribute to his fallen friend.
O’Barr’s treatment focused on a new Crow, a woman killed on her wedding day who comes back and seeks revenge on her murderers. To hear him describe the visuals of this specter finding her bloody vengeance while decked out in a wedding dress accented with barbed wire and nails in her head make me salivate at such metal imagery. Unfortunately, Miramax rejected the premise, saying they couldn’t make a big action thriller with a female lead. A few years later, they helped Quentin Tarantino make two Kill Bill movies with a strangely familiar setup to O’Barr’s rejected concept. Weird coincidence!
Next up to take a crack at a new Crow story was David S. Goyer. He’s an extremely accomplished screenwriter now, but at the time Goyer had yet to have one of his scripts produced into a feature. But despite also not feeling super into the idea of a new Crow movie because of a friendship with Brandon Lee (dude must have been just a delightful hang), he was assured by the studio that they would allow him to do something totally different in an effort to keep the memory of Lee sacred.
Like O’Barr, Goyer’s treatment featured a new female Crow, and added a twist of reincarnation to the series already famous for resurrection from the dead. The villain was supposed to be the reincarnated soul of Jack the Ripper somehow? I’ve heard enough. Let me see this movie right now, Miramax.
The studio loved the bold new direction of Goyer’s script, so they bought it and immediately changed it to be about a guy that looks a lot like Brandon Lee. Goyer was so upset and disappointed by this that he regrets not quitting the project to this day. The script is still accredited solely to Goyer though, but that doesn’t preclude the idea of uncredited screenwriters coming in and making a script out of whatever the producers said. Later, Goyer called the sequel, now subtitled with City of Angels, “a master class in how not to adapt a comic book.”
After a brief spell where musician Jon Bon Jovi was in talks to star, the new Crow was revealed: Swiss-born Vincent Perez, a native French speaker who had to be coached on his English pronunciation and who was almost certainly cast because of his resemblance to the late Brandon Lee.
This isn’t exactly the move you make if you want to create a new distinct work that allows the first movie to stand as a tribute to the star who died making it, but Perez’s presence isn’t inherently a death knell. Jean-Claude Van Damme delivered his lines with a French accent in all his movies, and he was one of the biggest action stars of the early ‘90s! And besides, Perez was ready to step up. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he addresses having to fill Lee’s boots in the wake of his death:
I don’t believe in superstition and stories about bad luck and bad karma. I’m sorry about what happened to Brandon but I’m bringing my story to the part, my journey.
Directing duties went to Tim Pope, a successful British music video creative who had previously worked with artists like The Cure and David Bowie. This would be Pope’s first feature film, but he had filmed enough strange visuals over the previous decade that putting him on the sequel for The Crow makes sense. Besides, the ‘90s was a great time for music video directors to make the jump to big-screen narrative features; this column has already covered breakout films from Michael Bay and David Fincher, both of whom got their start on MTV.
(This doesn’t exactly align with anything to with The Crow, but Tim Pope directed this absolute classic)
Pope, unfortunately, also fell victim to the deceitful practices of the Weinsteins. After filming City of Angels, the producers took control of the footage and passed it onto their own editors, instructing them to make the movie more like the first Crow by cutting it up and adding flashbacks. Tim Pope has disavowed this final cut of the movie, lamenting that “[the movie] was never supposed to be like this.” On his website, he calls the theatrical release of the movie he directed “a very uneven cut that [makes] no sense.”
Across every level of production, the Weinsteins and the rest of Miramax exerted control to take what could have been a unique new take on The Crow and instead desperately attempted to recapture the magic of the first movie. They rejected new concepts and went back on promises of not trying to cast a Brandon Lee lookalike. They pushed back against any story idea that dared to experiment or break from the structure of The Crow. They took the director’s footage and recut it in a way to resemble the structure of the first movie at the expense of the sequel’s quality.
These are not the decisions of people who believe in the enabling of creativity and artistic expression. Their years of being dangerous to women is their greatest crime, but the Weinsteins also made Hollywood worse by enforcing a rule of profits over everything, even if it ruins the reputation of something people love.
The Crow: City of Angels is best remembered as a disaster, a ruinous follow-up whose reception cast the franchise to the world of direct-to-video sequels until a theatrical reboot last year that bombed spectacularly. Every interview and article I’ve read frames this movie as the start of a string of very bad movies dubbed The Crow.
“The immediate downturn in quality in this series,” says everyone who has cared over the past three decades, “started with this first sequel.”
As someone who just watched an actually atrocious movie for this column, maybe I’m just in a good mood from getting to watch something that isn’t The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Crow: City of Angels is not a disaster despite its troubled production. It isn’t all that good, but I think the hate for it is just a bit overblown.
I’ll grant the haters this: the movie does not have a great first impression. If you couldn’t tell by the subtitle, City of Angels moves the gothic action from Detroit (the setting of the first movie) to Los Angeles, and the filmmakers attempt to convey the same kind of visual identity to LA that the first movie had for its setting. But whereas the first movie used darkness and rain to convey its sense of place, City of Angels opts to use a yellow overlay that makes everything look awful. When combined with some questionable compositing effects involving an actual crow and a greenscreen, it’s a rough opening few minutes.
Not helping matters is the truly baffling editing that caused Pope to stop making feature films for decades after. The use of short, jarring flashbacks in The Crow was a choice made out of necessity. It’s probably the part of that movie that’s held up the worst, but that style was a necessity after Lee’s death. Doing them in City of Angels using footage that was never meant to be shown as flashback reeks of the movie aping its own predecessor. The Weinsteins wanted to make the movie as much as possible like the first Crow, but their efforts just stand to highlight how the new entry just doesn’t compare to the original.
Vincent Perez is so hit or miss as Ashe. When the movie asks him to walk or stand in a brooding fashion (which happens a lot), he’s pretty physically imposing. He doesn’t have the instant body language chemistry that Lee did, but he’s fine for the character. The problem is when he starts talking. The Crow is a character that calls for some heart-wrenching angst, and Perez just isn’t up for it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a language thing, because there were moments when his delivery sounded alright. I just never bought him as a specter of violent revenge. His costume adds a bit more of a biker edge to differentiate himself from the goth rock look of the original Crow, but his face paint just makes him look straight up like a mime.
Not helping with the feeling of watching a street clown is a weird take on the character that makes him a goofy magician. Yeah, that’s right, in between violent murder, the character now finds time to bust out some illusions.
There were entirely too many moments of goofy guffaws and sleight of hand from Perez’s Crow. They didn’t serve to make him more frightening to the villains he was going after, and it’s not exactly funny to the audience. It’s more confusing than anything. Brandon Lee influenced a darker take on the Joker that has informed all depictions of the villain for nearly 20 years now. The Crow in City of Angels reminds me more of the version of the Joker from the animated Batman show that had just finished up a year before this movie came out.
Mia Kirshner does alright as Sarah, acting as a sort of human guide for the Crow in his quest for revenge. The movie does a poor job explaining the relocation of her character between the two films, but the performance is decent enough that I was along for the ride. But again, the editing process steps in again and makes the movie so much worse.
Somehow, a ton of scenes where she and Ashe develop a personal relationship were cut out, meaning that the moments that remain of unexplained sexual tension come off as bad filmmaking, not the culmination of a carefully developed subplot. This romantic development between the Crow and a mortal woman was the one new plot wrinkle that City of Angels had going for it, and the Weinsteins ruined it in the name of cutting the movie down to 90 minutes.
Despite the best efforts of Miramax’s leadership, there is some good to be mined from City of Angels. Richard Brooks does a great job as Judah, the film’s antagonist. He’s less fleshed out than his counterpart in the first movie, but his weirdo pagan sadism thing is a charming little villain quirk, even if it doesn’t go as far as it could. His underlings that Ashe works through on the road to the final boss aren’t as memorable, but their costuming and performances mesh well with the seediness of LA and reinforce the setting.
Actual rockstar Iggy Pop plays one of these criminal types, and even though he isn’t a great actor, the legendary singer has a striking charisma to his physical performance.2 And speaking of music, City of Angels retains the kickass alt-rock stylings of The Crow, and even features a live performance by Deftones during one of the climactic scenes.
The action itself is serviceable, but you can tell the filmmakers toned things down compared to the over the top brutality of the first film. The release of The Crow was controversial for how violent the movie was when someone actually died from a gunshot wound on its set. I find City of Angels to be an overcorrection. The violence of the original movie was a bit much at times, but there were multiple times while watching this sequel where it was unclear how the Crow had actually dispatched one of his enemies. Sure, it’s a cool scene when Thomas Jane’s body is found in a peep show booth, but the movie is so overly quick to avoid scandalizing too much with its violence that it failed to actually convey how he had died.
The end result of all of this is a true net neutral. For everything cool or interesting in City of Angels, there’s something equally as bad or confusing to offset it. It’s neat that the LA setting lets the team tie together the Crow’s mythology with Día de los Muertos, but it’s tough to see under the horrific piss filter that is constantly on screen. Perez is fine until he needs to talk, and every other actor is let down by what could be a whole other hour of cut footage. The list goes on.
The only truly bad part of City of Angels is its ending, which makes even less sense than the confusing stuff that came before. But by the time the credits rolled, I honestly just felt numb overall. This movie doesn’t make me like The Crow any less; instead its attempts to remind me of that first movie just leave me wishing I wasn’t watching City of Angels.
Still, a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes feels a bit overly harsh. While critics were right to point out that the magic of the original is nowhere to be found here, I feel like a lot of reviewers just went into this new Crow ready to hate it on principle. I know that because that’s what I was ready for. The reputation of City of Angels was built on terrible contemporaneous reviews that never give the movie much of a chance. In a review for The Austin Chronicle, Marc Savlov is pretty brutal, but does take a moment to at least give the movie grace for not ruining the original:
Suffice to say, when people think of the moribund, brooding [Crow], they think of Brandon Lee, and this sequel isn't going to change that one iota.
The Labor Day weekend release for the movie didn’t exactly make it an Independence Day style holiday smash, but it was enough to get City of Angels to a nearly $10 million opening weekend during a very slow time of the year at the box office. That grace did not extend past the first weekend though, because this movie bombed very hard.
By week three, it was making less than $1 million a weekend, and it limped along in theaters for another two months before finally moving on with a domestic gross of less than $18 million. That makes it by far the worst performing box office topper of 1996, and even though its international gross of $7.5 million pushed it above the $25 million mark overall, it wasn’t enough. That kind of a return with a $13 million production budget is considered a loss with the marketing factored in. The Crow was dead.
It’s obvious what happened. A large audience was built around The Crow, with a lot of folks originally turning out because of the morbid novelty of seeing a movie where its lead actor died while making it. But they stayed fans because it’s a great film that tackles appropriate topics like grief and the anger that can come with it. The original movie is the kind of work that a cult audience can easily form around, thanks to its distinct style and big thematic swings. Those fans could smell the stink of “cashgrab sequel” all over City of Angels. And even those that gave it a chance found a film that lacked any of the narrative depth or striking imagery of its predecessor.
In a way, “useless” was probably the best result that the sequel could have hoped for, if it couldn’t be as good or better than The Crow. At least if it’s inessential, the first movie can stand on its own, unaffected by the failure of its follow-up.
Unlike last week’s movie, City of Angels wasn’t a total disaster for all the people involved with it long term. Pope didn’t direct any features again, but he insists that was by choice; he instead stayed busy directing videos for some of the biggest rock stars on the planet. Mia Kirshner and Richard Brooks kept working in the world of TV, and while Vincent Perez didn’t become the next Antonio Banderas, he’s a decently successful actor and director in Europe to this day. The Crow is a funny blip on his filmography thankfully, when it could have very easily ruined his career.
The person who walked away from this project the best is its screenwriter, David S. Goyer. Even though he dislikes the movie to this day, getting a screenplay adapted at all is a big deal for any writer’s career. City of Angels got the ball rolling on decades of writing more movies inspired by and based on comic books, most of which were far more successful than this one.
In a funny full circle moment, Goyer’s next project was directed by Alex Proyas, the director of the original Crow. 1998’s Dark City is a strange movie, weird and mysterious but often beautiful. If you’re in the mood for some odd neo-noir action, I recommend it [4/5].
Unfortunately, City of Angels would serve as the last time a Crow appeared in theaters for nearly 30 years. The franchise entries became more intermittent over the years and were solely released directly to home video. After years of rumors, a full remake of the original film starring Bill Skarsgaard and FKA Twigs was released in 2024. Bad reviews and the optics of trying to replace Brandon Lee’s legacy made sure that that one bombed even harder than City of Angels. The franchise is surely back on ice.
If there’s one long-term benefit to The Crow: City of Angels, it’s this, and I’m sorry, I need to talk about pro wrestling for like two paragraphs.
Sting is one of the most beloved grapplers of all time, a charismatic fan favorite who retired just last year after a four decade career filled with iconic moments and all-time great matches. His transformation in 1996 from a colorful surfer dude to the brooding vigilante he would portray for almost 30 years after is directly inspired by Brandon Lee in The Crow; the facepaint is so identical that Miramax should maybe have considered a lawsuit against World Championship Wrestling.
But why would Scott Hall, the late wrestling great who suggested the gimmick change to Sting, be thinking about The Crow during the late summer of 1996? I can’t find definitive proof of this, but the timeline is just too perfect. Either Hall went and saw City of Angels or, more likely, saw a commercial for it, and it got him thinking about the original movie. After all, Brandon Lee’s original look is the facepaint he recommended Sting use for his gimmick change. For wrestling fans, the rest is history. The Crow: City of Angels isn’t good for much on its own, but it did help inspire one of the coolest wrestling characters of all time. Personally, that makes me feel a bit softer towards the movie.
City of Angels is not worth watching, honestly. It doesn’t work without having watched the original, but comparing the two just makes the sequel’s faults all the more noticeable. Quality-wise, this is not the total disaster that I was led to believe. “The Crow, but in Los Angeles” is probably the worst concept they could have gone with, but I don’t know if there was ever a chance for City of Angels. Maybe the original pitches from Goyer or O’Barr would have worked a bit better, but a new Crow was always going to be an uphill battle.
People had attached a lot of personal emotions to that first movie, and to this day it’s a well-loved cult classic. You don’t just follow that up with a cheaper, less ambitious sequel without coming across as crassly greedy. The Weinsteins are terrible men for a lot of reasons, and I won’t pretend their treatment of franchises like The Crow is comparable to the physical, psychological, and professional harm they enacted on countless actresses and other women over the years. But even if the movie isn’t a dumpster fire, making it in the way that they did is an incredibly shitty move.
Rating: 2.5/5
Next Week: Adam Sandler is an established comedy icon at this point, but early into his career he was still trying to find his lane. Let’s see him try to do a buddy action thing with Bulletproof.
See you then!
-Will
Fun fact: Lee’s stuntman was Chad Stahelski, an action veteran who later went on to direct the John Wick franchise.
Thuy Trang, the original yellow Power Ranger, also plays a notable underling in her only feature film role. Sadly, she would pass a few years later in a tragic car accident.