According to The Wrap, The Crow reboot we first regarded with a wary, grease-painted eye back in June has just brought in murder balladeer Nick Cave for script rewrites—which automatically makes the project much more difficult to dismiss. Cave previously proved he has what it takes to craft a noirish Western with his work on John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, and given that the next Crow is said to take place in the “Mexico/Arizona area” as well as within its usual urban setting, it’s easy to assume that it was his work there that landed Cave the job. You know, besides the fact that every project, film or otherwise, would be improved by the addition of Nick Cave, even if he's just sort of hanging out in the background.
Since making his screenwriting debut on Hillcoat’s Ghosts…Of The Civil Dead in 1988, Cave has been a “screenwriter to watch,” according to Variety, and has racked up projects ranging from an adaptation of Matt Bondurant’s bootlegging story The Wettest County In The World to a motion-capture version of The Threepenny Opera with Andy Serkis to a rejected Gladiator sequel. Enlisting his help suggests that director Stephen Norrington’s “terrific” screenplay isn’t quite as “terrific” as producer Edward Pressman originally made it sound, but hopefully Cave will find a way to make the franchise feel fresh again (even if does feature a bird that’s “not like Godzilla, exactly”).