Remember that Jane Siberry tune on the soundtrack to the original Crow film, ‘It Can’t Rain all the Time’? Turns out if you’re the producers of the reboot, the bad news doesn’t just rain, it buckets down. The latest punch comes in the form of the star they were chasing, Mark Wahlberg, passing on the pic.

"We never committed to making the movie," Wahlberg told Cinematical at the weekend. "They talked to me about it and there was a director attached who I was a fan of, and he's no longer doing it. We just thought about it – 'is there something cool to be done there?' But we're not committed to making the movie."

The director in question was Stephen Norrington, who left the film just two days after the original news broke about Wahlberg, citing creative differences with a different actor who had come aboard and decided that what the movie really needed was a new script. Which wasn’t especially good news to Norrington, since he’d been happily working away on a screenplay with Nick Cave.

So for now, it would seem that The Crow will have to lock down a new director and find a leading man to get killed and come back as a vengeful spirit with a feathered friend guiding him.

Wahlberg, meanwhile, has awards-buzzed boxing pic The Fighter coming up, and he’s about to start shooting Contraband (adapted from Icelandic thriller Reykjavik-Rotterdam) in January before moving on to Seth McFarlane’s raunchily comedic directorial debut Ted. That one, in case you missed the story about it, finds a boy wishing for his favourite teddy to come alive, only for it to stick with him into adulthood and start screwing up his love life.Yeah, that old story.