Greg Russo, the screenwriter of the currently in-development Resident Evil movie, recently revealed that the upcoming reboot will take major inspiration from, the most recent instalment in the game series, Resident Evil VII. Russo told DiscussingFilm that, whilst writing up his draft, VII served as a touchstone for him.
Obviously I’m a huge fan of the franchise so to work on that was a lot of fun. And they’ve made six films before so when you come back to that and reboot it, you wanna do something different and not just rehash.
For me it was very clear cut that I wanted to go back and make it scary again like a horror film in terms of the classic James Wan style so that was the pitch, going back and looking what made the games scary in the first place so yeah Resident Evil 7 was a bit of a touchstone for my draft.
Russo went on to explain that, while he appreciates the previous film's interpretations, the reboot will be more horror-centric and feature less "over the top action" - this should serve as a great relief to fan's of Capcom's long-running game franchise.
Yeah, exactly, and not to shame the original film franchise that was made, I think that did very well, when you create a fresh reboot and look at the over the top action of the Paul Anderson franchise, it was fun and really cool but at the end of the day, for me as a fan of the original game franchise, I always considered the franchise to be horror at the forefront and action as a secondary feature. So it just made sense to go back to the horror roots.
What do you think of Russo's comments? Are you looking forward to the, more faithful, Resident Evil movie reboot?
The Resident Evil movie doesn't currently have a set release date.