Although the original Resident Evil series is done and dusted (though a new rebooted version of the franchise is already in the works), director Paul W.S. Anderson and star Milla Jovovich still have a hankering to work together again. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise considering that they’re married, and they are teaming up again for another video game adaptation.
The duo have signed on to direct and star in Monster Hunter, an adaptation of the Capcom game series. Fourteen games have been released over the last decade and a half, with the most recent instalment, Monster Hunter: World, becoming the best-selling game in company history, with almost 8 million copies sold since its January release.
The games are an action fantasy series, where the player takes control of: “a Hunter, slaying or trapping large monsters across various landscapes as part of quests given to them by the locals. Players must use loot gained from slaying monsters, gathering resources, and quest rewards to craft improved weapons, armour, and other items that allows them to face more powerful monsters”.
Anderson has written the screenplay himself, and the film is intended to be the start of a franchise (naturally). It will be interesting to see how much Monster Hunter differs from Anderson/Jovovich’s previous collaborations, as it has plenty of similar aspects in place.
Although the Resident Evil series got plenty of deserved critical bashing, once Anderson got to grips with the themes he was trying to tackle, a couple of the later entries turned out to be rather good, most notably Afterlife. If he can transfer that same heavily-stylised, kinetic directing style to Monster Hunter, maybe this franchise can have more positive beginnings than Resident Evil did.
#Peace.Love.MonsterHunter
