Their budget was $20 and a bag of chips.
IGN has your exclusive first look at Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which Screen Gems bills not as a reboot or remake of their feature film franchise but rather as the origin story of the original Capcom games. Check out the three exclusive images below to see the new big-screen versions of Claire and Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Leon S. Kennedy, Albert Wesker and more characters gamers will recognize.
The upcoming film — written and directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, The Strangers: Prey at Night) — is based on the first two Resident Evil games. The movie chronicles how Raccoon City went from being a city of industry to a dying Midwestern town that’s become ground zero for the t-Virus outbreak.
In a new exclusive interview with IGN, Roberts elaborated on the differences between his Resident Evil movie, the prior films starring Milla Jovovich, and how his filmmaking approach here draws not only from the Capcom games but also old school genre filmmaking.
“This movie really had nothing to do with the previous franchise. This was all about returning to the games and creating a movie that was much more a horror movie than the sort of sci-fi action of the previous films. I was hugely influenced in particular by the remake of the second game and I really wanted to capture the atmosphere-drenched tone that it had. It was so cinematic. The previous movies were very bright and shiny whereas this movie was dark and grimy, entirely shot at night. It’s constantly raining and the town is shrouded in mist. … I was hugely influenced by movies like The Exorcist (and Exorcist 3!), Don’t Look Now, and The Shining. You can really feel the texture in this movie. Nothing in this town feels hi-tech. It feels dilapidated. I wanted Raccoon City to feel a bit like the town in Deer Hunter; a ghost town forgotten by the rest of the world. And the whole structure of the film was definitely very influenced by Assault on Precinct 13.”
