The reboot of The Crow that has been in development for more than two years has so far gone through two directors and two lead actors and shown no signs of progress. Last month Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later) departed the project and prospective star Bradley Cooper also moved on to greener pastures, but before they left Fresnadillo was working with comic artist Diego Latorre on conceptual designs for the film including many renderings of what Cooper would look like as Eric Draven, the murdered guitarist who returns from the dead to avenge his death and that of his girlfriend Shelley. You can check out a sample image here below.

Latorre has plied his artistic trade for DC and Marvel Comics as well as serving as a conceptual artist on the Fox TV series Fringe. The images he created for Fresnadillo’s take on James O’Barr‘s classic independent comic book miniseries are striking and very much in the tone of the comic and the 1994 film version starring the late Brandon Lee. While Bradley Cooper may never star in the new Crow, it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of what might have been. Personally I think Cooper is a talented enough actor that he could have pulled the role off and reversed a lot of those dissenting fanboy opinions. People forget that before Lee took the role that would not only be the greatest of his career but also tragically his last, he was primarily known for being the son of Bruce Lee and starring in a bunch of cheeseball action flicks like Laser Mission, Showdown in Little Tokyo, and Rapid Fire. If the man who once complimented Dolph Lundgren on the size of his manhood on camera to be immortalized on film for all eternity could play O’Barr’s guitar-strumming undead avenger of justice, then why not the star of The Hangover? Looks like we’ll never know.

Check out the rest of the art over at Shock Till You Drop.

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