The Resident Evil movie franchise came to an end of sorts earlier this year with the release of The Final Chapter, the sixth movie in Paul WS Anderson’s videogame adaptation series starring Milla Jovovich as kick-ass zombie killer and menace to evil corporations Alice. However, you can’t keep a good profitable brand down.
Variety reports that Constantin Films is in the process of working on a reboot film that would take Resident Evil back to square one, presumably motivated at least in part by the very decent box-office performance of The Final Chapter which, as the site notes, made $160 million just in China, and the fact that the game franchise is still doing very well.
It seems unlikely that Anderson and Jovovich will be back (although we wouldn’t be surprised to see at least one of their names in the list of producers), given how long they’ve been with the franchise and the fact that the film did give the character of Alice some kind of closure. It was also definitely one of the best films in the series and a high note for the duo to go out on.
So what next? There’s probably room to make a film that keeps more closely to the plot of the games, as the films spread their wings pretty early on (although Anderson obviously kept the level of fan service high with regular appearances from games characters and monsters). Variety says that the details about the creative talent involved is being “kept under wraps,” as are the exact plans for how it would be rebooted.
Anderson wrote and directed Resident Evil back in 2002, and went on to write every film in the series, only stepping away from directing for the second and third movies.
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