‘Resident Evil’ Already Tried Giving Fans What They Wanted. Now Let Zach Cregger’s Movie Speak for Itself.

There’s a loud corner of Resident Evil fandom that seems determined to hate these movies regardless of how anyone approaches them. Follow the games, and you didn’t follow them closely enough. Make something original within that world, and you apparently have no business touching the franchise.

I don’t want to take anything away from Christian McKnight’s recent article asking fans to stop complaining about Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, because I’m right there with him. But it got me thinking about Johannes Roberts’ Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City and how hilarious this argument becomes when you remember that we already tried going closer to the games. We still got what I thought was a bad movie, and plenty of fans were still angry.

I had a blast with the Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element) saga. Whether you consider those movies good or not, they were big, popcorn-munching action epics, throwing the games’ monsters and mythology into Anderson’s own kitchen sink of chaos. They found an audience willing to keep coming back for six movies.

That didn’t make them universally beloved by people who played the games. But they had an identity, and Anderson committed to it.

Then Constantin Film and Sony went back to the beginning with Roberts, whose credits included 47 Meters Down and The Strangers: Prey at Night. His approach put familiar characters and locations front and center, combining material from the first two games. Capcom even supplied the blueprints used to recreate the mansion and police station, Roberts explained to Looper.

His description of the response is pretty revealing.

“Oddly, the closer you stay to the game, the more people wanted it closer to the game.”

Roberts told Looper that taking the title and doing his own thing might have produced a different reaction. Instead, the affection he poured into recreating the games invited scrutiny of seemingly every choice.