While the summer movie season has been generally strong for the last couple of months, this past weekend was a bumpy ride so far as new releases were concerned. MGM’s “Blink Twice,” the feature directorial debut of Zoe Kravitz, did well enough for itself with a $7.3 million domestic start. Unfortunately for Lionsgate, the long-gestating “The Crow” remake didn’t fare nearly as well, to put it mildly. The new adaptation of James O’Barr’s graphic novel of the same name had nothing shy of a disastrous start to its box office run.
Director Rupert Sanders’ “The Crow” took in an estimated $4.6 million on its opening weekend, placing at number eight on the domestic charts. That was just barely above “Despicable Me 4” ($4.4 million), a movie that has been in theaters for going on two months. It also failed to gross more than the “Coraline” 15th anniversary re-release ($5 million), which is on its second weekend. Not only was this well below already low projections, it was less than half of what the original “Crow” made on its opening weekend in 1994, as that version opened to $11.7 million in its day.
What went wrong here? How did the producers miss the mark so badly? We’re going to go over the biggest reasons that “The Crow” failed to fly high at the box office. Let’s get into it.
The reasons are:
- The Crow failed to impress critics and audiences
- The Crow’s competition didn’t help matters
- The stench of development hell surrounding The Crow lingers
- The Crow franchise has been dead for years
- The Crow was another reboot nobody asked for
Here’s actually why: They took the story about Eric and Shelly, two sweet and innocent beacons of light in their community of poverty and crime, whose lives were snuffed out for standing up for their community against a criminal slumlord, with Eric’s undying love for his bride-to-be transforming him into a vessel for righteous retribution and they fucking turned it into a story about a couple lustful hedonists on a two week bender after escaping rehab. Shelly and Eric are murdered by the most forgettable villain who for some reason can ASMR you into killing yourself not to unlike the first half of this boring snooze fest of a plot finally punctuated by a cool action sequence when Eric goes to the Opera, kills every security guard on duty. I’m pretty sure one of those guys was one day away from retirement and another wasn’t even supposed to be there that day. To bad Eric is gonna murder hobo your ass because some patron inside killed his new fuck-buddy. And to top it all off SPOILER ALERT the whole fucking thing never happened because surprise surprise the EMT only had one NARCAN injection left and he used it on Shelly. I guess it was all a drug-fueled near death experience. 1/10 don’t even pirate it.
Holy shit, is that the actual ending?! Jfc, it might be a worse tragedy than Brandon’s passing.
So the whole movie plot is just a fever dream? I’m pretty sure plot twists like that just completely invalidate the whole story you went through, because they didn’t fucking happen, which begs the question why you’d even want to watch / read / play it in the first place?
