Resident Evil is one of the longest-tenured video game-turned-movie franchises in Hollywood history, and as the previous series has run its course, it's time for the reboot, naturally. Deadline reports that the Resident Evil reboot movie, which will take the story back to Raccoon City in 1998, will debut this fall, with September currently targeted.
The movie is said to stay faithful to the original, but perhaps that only means in comparison to the Milla Jojovich-led series we got, which began with slicing and dicing laser grids and got wackier from there with each subsequent sequel over nearly two decades.
Deadline previously revealed the cast to include Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia and Neal McDonough in a new origin story for the series to start fresh with. It's directed by Johnannes Roberts, who previously helmed 47 Meters Down in addition to an IMDb profile which seems to list only horror projects. If there was any doubt the movies would fall into the action category once more, that detail seems to dispute it strongly.
A September launch date for the film may mean a full theatrical release is possible, but from this distance that's totally the plan. We won't know how realistic that is for a few more months at least.
To date there have been six Resident Evil movies, spanning from 2002-2016. Though none of them have been anything close to well-received critically, with the best score on Rotten Tomatoes being a 37 for Resident Evil: The Final Chapter in 2016, each film has improved on its successor starting with the third movie, Resident Evil: Extinction.
Of course, video game adaptations in movie form don't have a great history to begin with. The best-reviewed of them Sonic The Hedgehog and Detective Pikachu, are both quite recent, and come after decades of clunky misfires like Max Payne, Super Mario Bros., and a slew of Uwe Boll-led disasterpieces like Far Cry. If the Resident Evil reboot wants to make like its video game counterparts and retell classic stories in a way fans adore, it will have to swim up the stream of a wretched history for this sort of project.
