Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City will be incredibly faithful to the original video games in its look, feel, story, and characters, according to writer/director Johannes Roberts. The upcoming film will be a new beginning for the live-action RE film franchise, which has previously focused primarily on stories outside the Capcom game series. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City stars Kaya Scodelario as Claire Redfield, Robbie Amell as Chris Redfield, Hannah John-Kamen as Jill Valentine, Avan Jogia as Leon S. Kennedy, Tom Hopper as Albert Wesker, and Lily Gao as Ada Wong.
Positioned as a retelling of the Resident Evil origin story, Welcome to Raccoon City will center on the Raccoon City outbreak – the initial infection event for the Umbrella Corporation’s deadly t-Virus – which comprises the story of the first three video games. The film will follow a few different groups of characters as they discover the nature and origins of the outbreak, all while fighting to survive the hordes of zombies and other monsters roaming the city streets.
All in all, it looks like the new movie is sticking pretty close to the Resident Evil games – something Roberts says was a top priority. In a recent interview with IGN, the film’s writer/director revealed that he and the rest of the creative team worked very closely with game publisher Capcom to make sure all the important pieces were loyal to the source material. Read Roberts’s full quote below.
"We worked very closely with Capcom. Every character and creature is from the game and as such, I wanted to be as faithful as possible. I wanted to create a truly immersive feeling for the fans. But that also became the trickiest part of adapting a piece of IP like this because I didn’t just want to put the game on screen - it had to be its own thing with living breathing characters and creatures (and, of course, zombies!) that felt true to the world."
The balance of loyalty and originality is the struggle of all adaptations, and it's one that many video game movies have failed to find in the past. Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil movies found great commercial success and developed a significant fan base, but they were always more focused on telling original sci-fi action stories than adhering to the events of the games. Welcome to Raccoon City is attempting to change that approach and recenter the video games in the story of the film, and it looks like it’s on the right track so far.
Roberts has promised that Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City will be much more of a horror movie than Anderson’s films, which makes sense given that the story is set during the Raccoon City incident. The early looks at the cast are promising, and if the stars can bring their characters to life as faithfully as Roberts’ team seems to be recreating Raccoon City itself, fans may finally have the live-action adaptation they’ve been looking for. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City releases on November 24, 2021.
Source: IGN