After amassing close to $1 billion across five live-action feature films, the Resident Evil series is primed for its curtain call early next year with the release of The Final Chapter.
Written and directed by series stalwart Paul W.S Anderson, Deadline is reporting that Anderson is already eyeing his follow-up project: Monster Hunter. First announced by Capcom at TGS 2016, the filmmaker revealed to Deadline that he is not only in possession of a script, but also plans to engineer a long-running movie saga based on Capcom’s decorated RPG series.
Resident Evil cohort Jeremy Bolt is also attached to Monster Hunter, which will be tethered with a production budget in the range of $50 million — not unlike the effects-heavy RE movies, then. Here’s the early synopsis: “For every Monster, there is a Hero. An ordinary man in a dead end job discovers that he is actually the descendant of an ancient hero. He must travel to a mystical world to train to become a Monster Hunter, before the mythical creatures from that world destroy ours.”
Sensing franchise potential, Paul W.S Anderson then went on to gush about the Monster Hunter series as a whole.
“What I love about Monster Hunter is the incredibly beautiful, immersive world they’ve created. It’s on the level of like a Star Wars movie, in terms of world creation. There are no real central characters so it’s a bit like when we first approached Resident Evil and imposed our own characters and story on that world. I think this is a perfect IP for us to do exactly that same thing again.
“I felt there was a fresh, exciting world that we could expose and build a whole world around, like a Marvel or Star Wars universe. Everything is about world creation, nowadays, and how can you build a world where you can have multiple stories going on? I thought this was our opportunity to have a cinematic universe.”
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, meanwhile, will close the book on Anderson’s live-action juggernaut on January 27, 2017.
[Source: Deadline]
