The upcoming Resident Evil movie reboot officially has a title alongside a few new details just recently dropped. Now called Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City, the upcoming live-action movie, directed by Johannes Roberts, will be set during the first two games of the franchise in 1998.
For those worried about whether or not the upcoming movie reboot will just be copy/paste from the films that Milla Jovovich was in, don’t be. In a recent interview with IGN, the director confirmed that while he liked her performance, this film will be completely rebuilt from the ground up as a full-fledged reboot.
The upcoming movie will center around telling the stories of key characters from this franchise like Claire and Chris Redfield, Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, and more. Also confirmed is that the array of characters is to pay homage to the feeling of the games where players typically can play as more than one protagonist.
“The big thing for this movie is tone. The thing I loved about the games is they were just scary as hell and that is very much what I wanted to,” Roberts tells the site. “That atmosphere — it’s rain, it’s constantly dark, it’s creepy. Raccoon City is kind of this rotten character in the movie and that sort of atmosphere in the games I wanted to put in [the film].”
He also confirmed that John Carpenter was a huge inspiration behind this undertaking, including movies like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog. This bodes well for earlier comments regarding the movie surrounding Welcome to Racoon City being very heavily rooted in the horror franchise.
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Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City will have two major focuses, as well. Obviously, Racoon City is a big focus, something we saw for ourselves with previous on-set leaks, but the police station will also play a major role. On top of that, the reboot will have a “creepy as f—” focus on the Spencer Mansion, though more on that hasn’t been revealed at this time.
It will be interesting to see the characters we’ve known and love for so long get a new eye, especially with the director name behind it. It also has an all-star team behind the film, including Robert Kulzer as producer (Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil movies), James Harris (I Am Not A Serial Killer), Hartley Gorenstein (The Boys), and Martin Moszkowicz as executive producer. Alex Zhang (Greyhound) and Victor Hadida are slated to co-executive producer, with Colin Scully and Alex Westmore overseeing the entire reboot.
With so many Resident Evil experiences on the horizon, it will be interesting to see how this new movie reboot compares. The original Paul W.S. Anderson series was met with much fanfare when the film series began, but each new movie seemed to stray further and further away from what Resident Evil is.
We’ll be able to see more for ourselves when Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City makes its theatrical debut on September 3.
[Source: IGN]
