Quoth The Crow, Nevermore

So they're remaking The Crow.

(Well, of course they are. It's a simple equation, really: they haven't yet, thus...)

How do I feel about this? Well, as of the latest round of news related to the remake's production, pretty damn fine - much, I should say, to my own astonishment. Because Nick Cave, the Bad Seed himself, has just been hired on to write the script, and that alone is assurance enough for me that we're looking at a better film than any of the execrable sequels that have kept the franchise ticking over this past decade.

Cave, for those of you who don't know, doesn't just spend his days growling God songs and murdering a young Kylie Minogue on Kerrang. He's also an accomplished author: alongside his debut, And the Ass Saw the Angel, he's published a collection of lyrics and plays and the acclaimed would-be John Hillcoat script, The Death of Bunny Munro - which, shame on me, I still have to read. What can I say? It's been a busy year, reading-wise.

In any case, Cave's also written a few scripts, and though the proposed sequel to Gladiator - said to close on "a 20-minute war sequence that ended up in Vietnam, and then in a toilet in the Pentagon, with [Crowe] as this rage-fueled eternal warrior" - didn't quite make it, The Proposition did, and what a film that was. Nick Cave can write: lyrics, poems, books and scripts. The hacks responsible for such travesties as The Crow: City of Angels, The Crow: Salvation and The Crow: Wicked Prayer - not so much.

I'm hardly gleeful at the prospect of yet another of my teenage touchstones being re-imagined for a new audience of naughties whippersnappers - apparently this time out Blade director Stephen Norrington is going for a "realistic, hard-edged and mysterious [movie], almost documentary-style" - but with Nick Cave on board, and bearing in mind the last three abominations to bear the name of The Crow, this is officially good news.

No news as yet who's going to be playing Eric Draven (I presume) so far, so let's all have a guess. Let's not confine ourselves to realistic possibilities here - just let fly with whomsoever you'd like to see carrying a blackbird on his (or indeed her) shoulder. For myself? One dude would make me particularly happy: give me Joseph Gordon Levitt!

What about you guys?