Far From ‘The Final Chapter,’ ‘Resident Evil’ Is Being Rebooted As a Six-Film Franchise
I’ve often wondered if there will come a time when people heartily defend the Resident Evil franchise. They’re not perfect movies, of course, and they increasingly have very little to do with the video game franchise they’re based on, but there are moments when Paul W.S. Anderson’s direction and Milla Jovovich’s star-power combined to elevate the whole affair into a kind of pulp extravagance that plenty of films cannot match. Given a bit of distance — or at least a bit of separation from a crowded field of VFX-driven action movies — maybe these films could get a critical boost to match their box office numbers.
Or! Or, we could just do it all over again and again until the world is a dark and empty husk! Wouldn’t that be fun? According to Variety (via iO9), that’s exactly what German studio Constantin Film is looking to do with the Resident Evil franchise. In a conversation at the Cannes Film Festival, studio head Martin Moszkowicz informed Variety that the they were looking to make launch another six films — six films! — in a reboot of the Resident Evil franchise. Minor details such as Anderson and Jovovich’s involvement are, of course, left to the imagination.
Look, I could rail against the Hollywood model of rebooting everything the moment it’s run its natural course, or the blood-from-a-stone approach that so many studio executives seem to take with their intellectual properties, but the Resident Evil movies made too much money worldwide for this to be anything but inevitable. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter took in $300 million worldwide on a budget of only $40 million, and that’s the kind of financial return that causes decision-makers to see dollar signs. So prepare yourself for another six movies, and then probably another six after that, and then there’s a good chance you’ll be dead so why bother worrying about it after that point?