That Resident Evil movie reboot has just taken a shotgun to the face after the departure of James Wan as director. Aiming to give the franchise a little more ‘bite’, Wan was originally tipped to direct the horror reboot and reinvent the ravenous apocalypse following 2016’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.
As the man behind Saw, The Conjuring, and (randomly) this year’s Aquaman, Wan definitely had the credentials to give Capcom’s acclaimed gaming series a more serious tone. Not that we didn’t love Michelle Rodriguez chewing the scenery as Milla Jovovich stomped around in a pair of heels, but the Resident Evil movies didn’t exactly have us hiding behind the cushions.
Speaking to Bloody-Disgusting, Wan revealed, “I’m not doing that anymore. That has been dropped.” He went on to share his frustration of being attached to the project prematurely. “They announce that I’m attached to a lot of stuff and a lot of them are not necessarily real,” he told the site.
“It’s kind of annoying when things come and go, or things never came in the first place,” said Wan. “I hate it when my projects get announced. It makes it seem like I’m attached to a lot of things when in fact I’m not necessarily doing so many things. A lot of my stuff just get announced and I don’t want them to be announced but people love to announce them.”
Considering Wan’s vision was tipped to be more like 2017’s Resident Evil 7 game and go back to the claustrophobic roots of the franchise, we were hoping for a horror reboot like Halloween or the Oscar-worthy It. Unfortunately, it’s back to square one, and for all we know, the REboot could be dead an buried.
Personally, I think Resident Evil would be better suited to a Netflix series to follow in the success of The Haunting of Hill House. Gamers will know that Capcom’s original game took a likeable batch of heroic characters and chucked them into an expansive mansion with hordes of the undead.
Resident Evil got ahead of itself and became a little too OTT with entries like Resident Evil 6, while the movie series got more and more ludicrous with each entry. Resident Evil is the highest-grossing game-to-movie series of all time, but with competition like Tomb Raider, it wasn’t going to be that hard.
Thankfully, things are looking a little brighter for Capcom as its Resident Evil 2 reimagining promises to be one of the biggest games of 2019. Wan will still get to fulfill his bloodlust with a Train to Busan remake, but as for the time being, those T-Virus-infected monsters will have to stay hungry.