“In Fifth Element, everyone expected Bruce Willis to be the star of the movie,” she said a few years ago. The former model (and avid gamer herself) had been acting for more than a decade, garnering attention in 1992’s Chaplin and the following year’s Dazed and Confused before transitioning to the sci-fi adventure The Fifth Element and the historical epic The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, both of which were directed by her former husband Luc Besson. Jovovich was an inspired, if not exactly obvious, choice. After ten days, I emerged with ten days' worth of stubble and kind of bloodshot eyes going, ‘I love this! We have to turn it into a movie.’" “I played the first two games back to back. “I'm a gamer, and I became obsessed with Resident Evil,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. In my view, you can’t make a horror game if you don’t have any fear.”Īnderson saw the potential for a movie in the game series, which included Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. “People who aren’t afraid of anything don’t understand what’s frightening. “If he’d answered that he never got scared, I couldn’t have trusted him with the project,” Fujiwara said. Legend has it that Fujiwara tapped Mikami for the job specifically because, although Mikami was a horror fan, he didn’t like being scared. In the game, an evil company, the Umbrella Corporation, unwittingly unleashes different monsters that you have to kill. Soon, he was eyeing another video game: Resident Evil, which was created by Japanese designers Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara in 1996. That latter film was directed by Anderson, and although it didn’t make many critics’ Top 10 lists, it was a big hit, helping to launch the British director’s American career. The problem was that, almost without exception, those adaptations were unspeakably terrible, resulting in disasters like Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, and Mortal Kombat. Which is ironic considering that, since the game’s inception, being scared was entirely the idea.Īs video games became a bigger and bigger business in the 1990s, Hollywood wanted to capitalize on their success by turning beloved properties into movies. That tends to be what they're scared of.” Resident Evil is their favorite game and they've been playing it for seven or eight years, and now some a**hole filmmaker is going to come along and mess it all up and ruin it. Anderson put it at the time, “The main problem is that you have a very strong core audience who expect a lot from a movie like this. Grim, grimy, wonderfully claustrophobic, and paying homage to sci-fi flicks, horror films, and B-movies of yesteryear, Resident Evil proudly created its own niche of R-rated shoot-'em-ups.Īs director Paul W.S. That would not be the fate of the Resident Evil series. But if you were to write a book about this century’s most enduring cinematic properties, Alice’s adventures would deserve their own chapter, especially when you consider all the video game adaptations that sputtered out after one movie. Part zombie action-thriller, part dystopian drama, part mystery - what are these strange flashbacks Alice keeps experiencing? - Resident Evil got terrible reviews and was hardly a theatrical smash. Whoever Alice used to be, apparently she was a bit of a badass herself. She quickly finds herself joining a special forces team that is journeying deep underground to infiltrate the Hive, a corporate facility that’s doing all types of genetic experiments - one of which has gone haywire, turning the compound’s scientists into zombies.Īt first, Alice is just along for the ride - badass soldiers like Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) seem far more equipped for this life-or-death mission than she is - but when confronted, Alice discovers she has lightning-quick reflexes and an incredible ability to deliver devastating martial arts kicks. The film starred Milla Jovovich as Alice, who wakes up on the floor of a shower, not sure where she is or what’s going on. It all got started with the first installment, Resident Evil, which hit theaters 20 years ago today on March 15, 2002. Over the span of six films in 15 years, the franchise, based on a popular video game series, has grossed $1.2 billion - not bad for movies that are usually only budgeted at around $60 million. In that world, Resident Evil is fairly major. But there’s a world outside of Pixar, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Extended Universe, Star Wars, the Fast and Furious films, and those other behemoths. When we think of movie franchises, we tend to focus on the monster blockbusters - the ones that cost upward of $250 million and bring in around a billion dollars.
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