The Resident Evil movie franchise is getting an official reboot with the release of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City this month. However, while the Resident Evil games are certainly a landmark series that is loved around the world, most movie fans know the name Resident Evil from one of the most successful blockbuster franchises of the 2000s. It’s no secret that hardcore gaming fans were never happy with how many liberties the Resident Evil movies took with the source material; so will Sony and Screen Gems be doing things differently with this new vision of the franchise?
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WATCH: Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City Trailer
The ComicBook.com podcast ComicBook Nation sat down with Johannes Roberts, the director and writer of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Naturally, one of the first questions to ask was how the Resident Evil movie reboot will be different from the 2000s series starring Mila Jovovich. According to Roberts, a new approach to Resident Evil is something that the times demand:
“The thing is times have changed, I think. When the first film franchise came out, adapting a computer game was very much seen as ‘people know the name, so take the IP, take the name… and then do whatever you want,” Roberts explains. “Just take the name and do anything, add some value. Over the last 20 years, that’s really changed. There’s become this real respect for the game. I think games have just developed themselves and just become so sophisticated, as well. It was this idea that became sort of paramount in the way that we pitched [the film] and in the way we moved forward like, ‘Look, let’s take this seriously.’”
As Johannes Roberts further elaborates, it’s this graduation of gaming itself to a more complex and sophisticated level that makes his job adapting a film more like the classic process of adapting literature for the screen:
“This is like a novel. If you’re adapting a novel, you take the source material very, very seriously. It was the same with when we went back to the game and it was like, look, let’s go back, let’s tell what excited us when we were kids, when I played this as a student. Let’s make a super scary horror. To be the horror guy coming on and like, let’s really make something that’s terrifying, dark, scary, fits the tone. It was just a really exciting thing that just hadn’t been done before at all with the previous franchise. It was a lot of fun.”
Indeed, the previous Resident Evil films achieved worldwide acclaim by leaning on the action spectacle element as much as the survival horror element that made the games a pioneering success. Hopefully fans who have been waiting on a more faithful adaptation of the material are pleased with the results.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City will be in theaters on November 24th. You can watch the full interview with director Johannes Roberts above – and subscribe to the ComicBook Nation Podcast HERE.
