Resident Evil’s Success May Have Just Inspired Another Video Game Movie Reboot (After Its Latest Film Bombed This Year)
It only took Resident Evil eight movies and a streaming TV show to finally settle on one that almost everyone seems to like. As such, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil can be something of a role model for franchises that seem to have exhausted their chances and their goodwill. That’s not to deny the Paul W.S. Anderson-led, six-film series starring Milla Jovovich had its fans — they did well enough to keep getting made, even though they mostly took the zombies and monsters from the game and little of the actual substance. But when Welcome to Raccoon City attempted to reboot the movies by sticking closer to the games, it did worse than the Jovovich films, mainly for trying to cram the first two game stories into one. Most other franchises might have remained dormant a lot longer, but Resident Evil lucked into having the director of an Oscar-winning horror movie get interested.
According to a report from Dread Central, Silent Hill is preparing “a bold new take on the franchise” for the screen. This comes after Return to Silent Hill, the third movie in the series, came out in the U.S. this year, in January, and barely got any attention. Internationally, the film made $47 million on a $23 million budget. Imagine what it could have done if stateside audiences had gone to see it. Ironically, 2006’s Silent Hill was a well-done, fairly well-liked game adaptation right out of the gate; it was hampered as a franchise by a lackluster 3D sequel, and the third film being stuck in the January box-office graveyard (plus the box office dominance of Avatar: Fire and Ash).
Silent Hill Reboot Inspired by New Resident Evil in Early Stages
Like the Resident Evil games, the Silent Hill games are more about avoiding monsters than shooting them all; like Zach Cregger’s movie, they tend to involve a protagonist way over their head in a town full of threats. Among its distinctive horrors are a group of physically twisted, faceless nurses and a gigantic judge figure with a huge sword who’s informally called “Pyramid Head” for his distinctive and huge helmet. The town itself is full of liminal spaces and hallways reminiscent of Backrooms; the time just might be right for an actual gamer to really capture the dread that Christophe Gans approached with the first movie.
It’s not every video game property that’s going to get a Zach Cregger-level director interested, but Resident Evil also isn’t the only game franchise to count on yet another reboot being the charm. October brings us Street Fighter, which looks like the first U.S. live-action movie, out of three, to actually stick to the very basic game story about a fighting tournament in which contestants can throw psychic fireballs. (The 1994 Street Fighter movie has gained more fans since it came out than it had at the time, but not because of any fealty to the gameplay.)
Resident Evil as a game, however, spearheaded the entire subgenre of survival horror, and it’s possible that by finally hitting the sweet spot with a movie, it opens the floodgates for adapting other titles in the same category correctly.