Resident Evil is turning live-action once again with a new reboot, so now comes the question of whether it can escape its campy but mediocre past.
The Resident Evil series is obviously an immensely popular one, enough so that it’s had plenty of live-action adaptations over the years, some better than others, none of them all that great. A lot of the films have been helmed by Paul W. S. Anderson, but the most recent one, 2021’s Welcome to Raccoon City, directed by Johannes Roberts, was a big ole box office flop. Since then, there was the 2022 Netflix series simply titled Resident Evil, but for the most part it’s been pretty quiet on the live-action adaptation front. Except now, according to The Hollywood Reporter, a reboot is on the way for the film side of things, with Barbarian director Zach Cregger taking over the director’s chair this time around.
Right now various studios are apparently engaged in a bidding war for the reboot, with four studios in total trying to edge each other out, Warner Bros. and Netflix supposedly among them. The film will be produced by Constantin Film, which has held the film and TV rights to the series since the late ’90s, and it’ll be doing so alongside PlayStation Productions.
To me that certainly implies that the scope will be along the lines of more recent big game adaptations a la Uncharted and the upcoming Horizon: Zero Dawn movie, rather than something a bit cheaper like the aforementioned Welcome to Raccoon City. Shay Hatten, best known for his work on John Wick: Chapter 4 and Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, is reportedly set to co-write the new adaptation, too.
Cregger is a pretty good name to have attached to a series like Resident Evil – Barbarian grossed $45 million on only an estimated $4 million budget, and reviewed positively too, an impressive feat for such a small film. It’s fun and a bit silly in places too, which is exactly what Resident Evil could do with. Considering we’re still in the bidding war stages, I imagine we won’t see this one for a while, so you’ll just have to hope that Capcom has a new game announcement coming soon.