This past weekend at the Twin Tiers Comic Con in Elmira, New York,
The Crow creator James O’Barr shared an interesting story about his comic book. It turns out the series was almost adapted into an anime, but studio licensing prevented it from happening.
"Funimation wanted to do a The Crow series," O'Barr told an audience at his artist's spotlight panel at the First Arena in Elmira. "It was right after they did Afro Samurai. A bunch of these Japanese executives flew over to meet with me and talk with me about it, and I thought that was just a phenomenal idea. With anime, the violence is so over the top and I thought it would be perfect."
The Animation Company went on to release
Afro Samurai in 2007, starring
The Avengers’ Samuel L. Jackson. The Series was a hit airing on Spike TV, and spawning two DVD’s a standard one and a director’s cut. Sadly The Crow would never get to work with Funimation and taste the same success. The structure of O’Barr’s deal with the studio created a situation he couldn’t he couldn’t afford.
"Unfortunately the deal I have with Hollywood is that I own the character and the publication rights and they own the film and TV rights. And what Hollywood did is, 'Yeah, he can make it. Give us $6 million and he can license it,'" O'Barr explained. "Well, that’s the whole budget, right there, so that was a big disappointment because I really wanted to see that. They did Afro Samurai, they did Black Lagoon. It was an amazing company and I would have really liked that. I thought they could have done something really phenomenal.”
All of that is in the past and O’Barr who continues to push for adaptations of his work remains optimistic.
“But the cool thing is that now The Crow is with a new studio and they’re much more open to that. So if we can get the Japanese interested again, I would love to see something like that. Because in my opinion, they kick Disney’s ass all over the street."
How unfortunate, it sounds like a great opportunity was squandered. Hopefully a new studio will be more open to this idea. What do you guys think with the live action movie in limbo would an anime series be a good way to reintroduce Eric Draven. Leave your comments below.