It’s harder than you might think to stay away from Raccoon City.
From the moment Resident Evil hit the gaming community like a thermobaric bomb in 1996, it was destined for the big screen. The first game was already heavily indebted to cinematic benchmarks like Night of the Living Deadand The Thing,and the series hasn’t stopped pulling ideas from the film industry — the nightmarish Southern Gothic dynamics of Resident Evil 7can be traced back to something like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.The franchise has made its presence felt on the big screen for over 20 years, with the first attempt at an adaptation, Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2002 film Resident Evil, coming out only six years after the first game.
There are eight live-action films in the Resident Evil franchise, with six belonging to Paul W.S. Anderson and the seventh being a 2021 reboot. Clearly, Hollywood has no desire to let such a valuable IP fall by the wayside, and if the historic box office success of the newest film, Zach Cregger’sResident Evilre-reboot, is any indication, it’s only a matter of time before another one hits theaters. And while it seemed for a moment like Cregger was done with the franchise, a recent comment suggests that he’s got more story to tell about the Raccoon City outbreak.
During a guest appearance on The Town podcast, Cregger was asked whether he’d be okay with producing sequels to Resident Evilthat he didn’t write or direct, to which he responded that he “would want to have some hand in them,” because he “can’t help but have an idea for where that franchise could go.”
It’s certainly a far cry from statements earlier this year, when Cregger expressed frustration at the circumstances of adapting IP and the rigid expectations of fans demanding extreme fidelity to the source material (feelings he expresses in the same interview), but six weeks of praise from both critics and audiences would be enough to change anyone’s mind. Cregger is already producing a prequel to last year’s critical and commercial hit Weapons,and while he’s not writing the screenplay (his involvement is currently only in the story department), it’s clear that he’s not entirely opposed to revisiting his own work if the opportunity arises.
Like Paul W.S. Anderson’s first film, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evilcenters on an original character, and although general audiences welcomed that approach, many longtime fans complained about a lack of engagement with the established characters and lore. The movie’s ending perfectly sets up a sequel that could introduce characters like Leon Kennedy or Jill Valentine, while also expanding the world and giving us more of the shadowy corporate conspiracy only teased in the movie. Having grossed over $400 million at the box office, and quickly becoming the highest-grossing movie in the series, it would be remarkable for Resident Evilto not get some sort of follow-up at this point, so it could only be a positive for the man responsible for that success to return.
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