Bill Skarsgård learned from the failure of The Crow

When Horowitz asked whether he’d learned any lessons from The Crow, Skarsgård smirked and said quite dryly, “I think the lesson was I’m not signing onto anything without a finished script.” Before Skarsgård’s bow as Draven, a new film based on James O’Barr’s The Crow comic series had been mired in production hell since Relativity Media first attached Stephen Norrington (Blade) to write and direct in 2008. A beef over Crow rights between Relativity and The Weinstein Company kept franchise revival attempts in limbo until Relativity filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2015. From there, the property shuffled off to various production companies—with projects suddenly springing out of the crown like revenge-hungry, fashion-conscious wraiths, boasting names like Bradley Cooper, Jason Momoa, Norman Reedus, Jack Huston, and Tom Hiddleston—when Sanders came on board to direct in 2022.

Even with years of abandoned, half-baked takes showing how not to approach The Crow, Sanders’ film locked in a release date and began casting before the script was finished. “It’s surprising how common it is that something gets greenlit and then you’re struggling with finishing the script, because the dates are already set and [everything’s] already up in motion,” Skarsgård said. “Rupert and I, we just struggled with it. The script came in, the first script, [two] months before we started to shoot! It was an insanely kind of rushed process in that regard.” Yet even though The Crow 2024 didn’t become a highlight of Skarsgård’s career (even with its splotchy face makeup, cool katanas, and other post-gothy whatnots), he doesn’t regret making it. “I don’t regret any of the roles that I’ve done. I think that they could be good experiences, they could be bad experiences, but how you learn from them is really what it’s about.”