Relativity's remake of The Crow has had a rough go of it. It was originally going to be directed by F. Javier Gutiérrez, but he left and was replaced with Corin Hardy. And now it's lost its star. But Hardy is still committed to making the project worthy of both the original movie and the graphic novel.
Evans' departure isn't a huge surprise, since he told Den of Geek back in December that "at the minute The Crow is not, not for me, I think it's a little… I mean I'm sure it's going to go ahead at some point, but I have other projects that are greenlit and ready to go and projects that I'm very interested in and you know, I can't wait much longer!" And now he's really, truly, and officially out. The Wrap reports that Hardy will start looking at replacements soon.
Meanwhile, Hardy is at the Sundance Film Festival for the premiere of his first film, The Hallow. And he was plenty excited about his plans, telling Fangoria:
It's still early days on that, but what I can say for now is that I'm a huge, huge fan of both the first film [pictured above] and James O'Barr's graphic novel. I was obsessed with The Crow when I was growing up. When I heard about the remake, what I thought could be very interesting today, 20 years later, especially with this whole Marvel Universe that's happened, is that the Crow always stood as an outsider to me. I kind of felt he would be the right character for me if I got the chance to do it. And now that I have gotten the chance to do it, I'm very much going back to the graphic novel, particularly looking into the illustrations themselves as much as the story, and picking out all those beautiful ideas and details that haven't really been used yet.
Hardy also strangely name-checked Marvel and the Dark Knight movies, which he is right shouldn't be influences for The Crow at all:
I also want to open the story up in such a way that the Crow is now part of a world where there are the Marvel movies and the Dark Knight movies. I intend it to be incredibly emotional and brutal, and all the things you'd want from a Crow film. I want to make a movie that I would have wanted to see, as a huge fan of The Crow.
There's still no word if all this upheaval will affect the planned 2015 filming schedule, but that seemed pretty optimistic even before Evans left.