It’s Halloween weekend, which feels like the right time for one of the strangest “what if” stories in Michael Jackson’s long career.
Before one of the darkest comic-book movies of the 1990s ever got made, a Hollywood studio reportedly had a very different plan for it. It wanted a musical, and it wanted Michael Jackson in the lead role.
The man who created the story laughed out loud when he heard it.
So which movie was it?
It was “The Crow.”
If you missed it back then, “The Crow” is a dark, gothic comic-book movie that came out in US theaters on May 13, 1994. It was directed by Alex Proyas, and it did very well, bringing in $94 million on a $23 million budget.
It all started with a comic book series by an artist named James O’Barr, first published in 1989. It was his creation from the start. So when Hollywood came calling, he had a pretty good idea of what his story was supposed to feel like.
If you’d like to hear from the man who dreamed it all up, here’s an interview with O’Barr as the creator of “The Crow.”
An interview with James O’Barr, the creator of “The Crow”
O’Barr says his first meeting with a major studio didn’t go the way he expected. According to O’Barr, the studio wanted to turn his dark story into a musical, with Michael singing and dancing in the lead.
He tells the story in a special feature on the movie’s two-disc DVD from 2001. VICE reports that the pitch came from a producer who has never been named, and that music video director Julien Temple was the top choice to direct that version.
O’Barr’s reaction was probably the same as yours.
“I thought it was a joke, you know? I started laughing,” he says.
The other man in the room wasn’t laughing. “But he was completely serious, and that’s how it is in Hollywood.”
Here’s O’Barr telling it himself in the DVD feature.
James O’Barr remembers the plan to make “The Crow” a Michael Jackson musical
One thing is important to be clear about. Nothing shows Michael was ever approached about this, or that he even knew the idea existed. It was a studio pitch, and that’s where it stayed.
O’Barr didn’t have much patience for studios that wanted to change his story into something else. Talking about their ideas, he put it bluntly. “Why did you even buy this thing if you wanna completely change it into something unrecognizable?”
A few other names came up during the early planning. Christian Slater and River Phoenix were both early ideas for the lead.
In the end, the part went to Brandon Lee, son of martial arts star Bruce Lee. The movie stayed dark and stayed close to the comic O’Barr had created.
It’s fun to wonder what a Michael Jackson version might have looked like, even though it never went beyond a pitch. If you ever watch “The Crow” again, you’ll know it was once a very different movie, at least in one studio’s imagination.