Structure. Take RE1. 80% of that game is walking around, picking up items, pushing things, and reading notes. Doesn't translate very well into a movie. Then there's expectation. Say you're doing a "faithful adaptation" so now all of a sudden you, or more likely the studio, has dropped a fuck load of pressure onto everyone involved and a single deviation could make or break your movie. So the smartest decision is always homage. Take what makes a vidya work, and have fun with it. Unfortunately all too often we see that fun lost to the profit margin like we did the RE movies.
The problem with the RE movies are that they were all just action shit. The first 5-6 games were survival horror to a tee. Sure it had over the top bullshit in it like zombies, giant spiders and snakes and shit but the point is it was still survival horror. RE games didn't become action bullshit until RE4. So when the movies came out it was such a harsh clash to what people were used to when it came to Resident Evil. For a timeline reference, the first RE movie dropped in 2002. RE4 didn't drop until 2005, 3 years later. So the series was still survival horror back then, which is why it got shit on so badly. Personally, I liked it, but idk I have a knack for videogame movies so it doesn't say much. I also liked the Silent Hill movies even though everyone hates them.
I forgot to add that Apocalypse came out in 2004 as well. So that was 2 movies that came out that were just action-hero bullshit, that's supposed to be representing a gaming franchise that's survival horror, it just didn't make any sense.
>RE games didn't become action bullshit until RE4
lol wut. Anon RE1 you have an argument but even then after 2./3rds you're fucking everything with a shotgun and grenade launcher. RE2 has so much ammo that you can kill everything. Twice. and RE3 has an option to start you off with an assault rifle in EZ modo, while the main mode throws weapon parts and gunpower at you like its going out of fashion. The presentation changed in 4, it went even harder on the action elements. But lets not pretend here that the series hasn't loved that shit since its inception. Hell just to hammer it home here's part of the opening to RE1:
The game was still survival horror. It wasn't dudes with machine guns and grenades blowing up africans and mexicans while punching boulders and regrowing their limbs and shit. You know exactly what the fuck I mean, I even mention shit like the giant snake and croc and spider and you STILL choose to be disingenuous like a retard. The games weren't action-hero bullshit point blank. The movies were. It was jarring and the reason why it wasn't well-received.
>It wasn't dudes with machine guns and grenades blowing up africans and mexicans while punching boulders and regrowing their limbs and shit
True, it was just dudes with machine guns and grenade launchers blowing up cops and scientists with some Matrix running and 1v1 a chopper, Solid Snake style. I'll give you the bolder punching though. The old games never went THAT far.
Sony pushed for the RE films to be more action-oriented. This tactic worked for Terminator and Alien, so it sort of made sense.
I don't get why horror fans lose their shit over horror franchises abandoning horror. And I really wonder how Terminator 2 would be perceived today. It feels like nobody wants to acknowledge that Terminator 2 totally abandoned horror to immense success.
Why is the storyline of Resident Evil games and movies so different?
Is the first sequel the only one that cleanly transitions? They drop every hook at the end of all these movies and pivot into something completely different. Abandoning the Canada arc, abandoning the clones, Wesker is good, Wesker is bad, she has powers now, now she doesn't. The RE film franchise is a complete fucking mess.
Yeah. The third film onwards is just way out there with the whole planet dying. The 3rd film is a very guilty pleasure for me as I enjoy the premise and Mila's nips in that outfit make me lose my mind. But you couldn't pay me to watch any of the others again. Or rather you could but it would be DAMN expensive.
There are time jumps for each sequel, but they do transition. For example:
The ending of Apocalypse has Umbrella able to remotely control Alice, and allowing her to leave. The zombie situation is supposedly under control.
Extinction opens with Alice on the run because she's afraid that if Umbrella locate her they can send her commands via satellite. Containment has failed. (In the script for the first movie, the Red Queen said that containment would fail within 2 months or so, a line that was cut from the film.)
Extinction ends with Alice talking to Umbrella's HQ who are located in Tokyo.
Afterlife opens with Alice and quite a few of her clones travelling to Tokyo and blowing the shit out of Umbrella HQ. Most of her clones are killed.
Afterlife ends with Umbrella attacking the ship Arcadia with a fleet of VTOLs.
Retribution opens with Umbrella attacking the ship Arcadia with a fleet of VTOLs.
Retribution ends with Alice in Washington and the final battle for humanity's survival is happening.
The Final Chapter, for complicated reasons including budget cuts and hasty rewrites and studio interference opens the next day, in the aftermath of the battle. The film cannot legally say what happened during the battle, but there is a direct continuity of sorts.
The Final Chapter brings up the clones again. I personally suspect they were going to have some kind of twist that the Alice in TFC is a random clone pretending to be the Alice from the previous movie. Isaacs has a freezer full of clone heads, and the reason he thinks THIS Alice is the real one isn't really explained.
The reason each film was unable to pick up directly from the previous one was basically issues with Sony. For example, Extinction was meant to have opening scenes with Jill and Alice and Alice leaving, but they couldn't get Jill's actress back due to a scheduling conflict, so had to rewrite the entire film to work around this.
because for some ungodly and absolutely FUCKING retarded reason they didn't want to copy the story of the games, even though that would've made the movies insanely popular
I only watched the first two movies and they were alright even if they were nothing like the game. I really fucking miss late 90s/early 00s action shlock though. Rewatched the first RE and Blade and they just don't make em like that anymore.
Became a vehicle for Paul Anderson to keep his wife working. Originally shoehorned in actual RE characters to play second-fiddle to Alice and the occasional other shout-out to the games, but really the movies are popular enough in China they could have just dropped the RE stuff entirely by the third movie and they would have done just as well as a series of generic action movies.
>Milla demands an obligatory nude scene, with nipples and bush fully exposed, in every movie she does >Paul is not only ok with it, he enables it and films it himself
Based?
Because the games have bad stories. In hindsight they absolutely made the right choice. The CG movies that take place between the games are mostly terrible.
In order to make Resident Evil a viable movie franchise, they needed a central protagonist that didn't belong to Capcom. That's why Alice was created. And once they had Alice, they had to come up with a villain, which was Dr. Isaacs, who was a rewritten version of William Birkin. And things flowed from there. Each new movie was about Alice's ongoing journey of self discovery and her battle against the Umbrella Corporation and Dr. Isaacs. After Isaacs was defeated in the third movie, her conflict shifted to fighting Wesker, but the twist was always going to be that the head of Umbrella was herself, that she was just a copy who had completely gone off the rails.
In terms of adaptation, you have to look at what the original material offers. The characters in RE aren't very good. And they come with rights baggage. So some people have this idea about making Resident Evil movies about Jill and Leon and Chris and it's really not that appealing. Audiences have shown little interest, and it's creatively stifling.
Alice, or an Alice-like character is going to pop up in RE adaptations for the foreseeable future. That's why the ill-fated Netflix adaptation starred Jade and Billie Wesker.
Then the argument becomes why make them Resident Evil movies at all? Because they wanted to piggyback on the name for free publicity or no one would have gone to see their tbh kinda shitty action movies.
In order to make Resident Evil a viable movie franchise, they needed a central protagonist that didn't belong to Capcom. That's why Alice was created. And once they had Alice, they had to come up with a villain, which was Dr. Isaacs, who was a rewritten version of William Birkin. And things flowed from there. Each new movie was about Alice's ongoing journey of self discovery and her battle against the Umbrella Corporation and Dr. Isaacs. After Isaacs was defeated in the third movie, her conflict shifted to fighting Wesker, but the twist was always going to be that the head of Umbrella was herself, that she was just a copy who had completely gone off the rails.
In terms of adaptation, you have to look at what the original material offers. The characters in RE aren't very good. And they come with rights baggage. So some people have this idea about making Resident Evil movies about Jill and Leon and Chris and it's really not that appealing. Audiences have shown little interest, and it's creatively stifling.
Alice, or an Alice-like character is going to pop up in RE adaptations for the foreseeable future. That's why the ill-fated Netflix adaptation starred Jade and Billie Wesker.
If a property isn't a "viable movie franchise", it's better not to adapt it at all then make some trash that has nothing in common with it.
>Then the argument becomes why make them Resident Evil movies at all?
Because their job was to adapt Resident Evil. To keep the parts of Resident Evil worth keeping while throwing the parts that would just get in the way.
Seconding this.
[...]
If a property isn't a "viable movie franchise", it's better not to adapt it at all then make some trash that has nothing in common with it.
Why leave money on the table like that? There are lot of comics and games and books and stuff that have a few great ideas in a sea of shitty ones. Why not take the good ideas, rework them, and make a new version? That's how movies like Wanted got made. The original Wanted comic book is retarded. But it has some good ideas worth keeping. And you also avoid the risk of a lawsuit.
And yet what they came up with was action movies with RE characters awkwardly thrown in for no reason, since Alice does everything anyway. They could have just gone the route that Netflix show did and just have Wesker. He's the only one who comes close to having anything resembling an important role in them.
Wesker can't be the lead character. Capcom own him. That's why Jade Wesker is the main character in the Netflix show. >And yet what they came up with was action movies with RE characters awkwardly thrown in for no reason, since Alice does everything anyway.
Alice does everything because she's the main character. That's how action movies work. The whole POINT of Alice is to be the lead character. When you watch a Die Hard movie, John is always the one who saves the day. These aren't ensemble films. These aren't about the power of friendship. One of the biggest sources of inspiration is RoboCop. Umbrella basically made RoboCop (Alice) and ED209 (Nemesis). When you watch a RoboCop film, who saves the day? It's always RoboCop, but some other characters are there to help sometimes.
In a recent interview, Paul mentioned that Retribution had reshoots at Sony's insistence because the original cut of the movie did not explain why was going on. It was a deliberately confusing maelstrom of set pieces where Alice stumbled from one test environment to the next. The scenes of exposition, and ALL the Red Queen scenes, were added in reshoots.
It's kind of wild that after the original movie team quit, they rebooted with Andrew Dabb and Johannes Roberts, and BOTH of them fucked up. It feels like it's only a matter of time before they go back and make another Jovovich film.
Tolerating this blatant race-swapping of white characters just to shoe-horn diversity quotas should never be tolerated. If they want diversity, make new characters or, you know, use pre-existing ones like Marvin Branagh. They're doing it deliberately, it adds nothing to the product, they just want to trigger a reaction. If it was the reverse and existing non-white characters were being race-swapped to white, you can be damn sure we'd be hearing about it from every corner.
Paul W.S. Anderson is a huge, huge race-gender-blind casting advocate. I'm surprised he didn't race-swap anyone in the RE films. On his new movie, the "exceedingly fair" Lady Melange is played by a black woman. And the character "Ash", created for the film, was written as a man in his 40s, but swapped for a woman in her 40s after Anderson liked an audition.
So imagine if Anderson had cast a woman as Chris Redfield. Maybe Capcom just didn't allow that sort of thing. I've heard Anderson wanted to make Chris gay and Capcom wouldn't allow it.
They got tired of Romero being uncooperative. Constantin Film tried very hard to make things work with him, and after they fired him, they were fully prepared to cancel the movie completely. But they caught wind of Paul W.S. Anderson, director of Event Horizon, having an alternate pitch.
It's sort of like how the original team for Bloodlines 2 got fired, they almost cancelled it, but then they heard another studio had a pitch.
>you lived long enough to see Hollywood fall so far and so hard that you're nostalgic for at least the first two Resident Evil movies
What an awful time to be alive.
I don't get why some people are so infatuated with the second Resident Evil movie. It was a mess. Milla Jovovich publicly apologized for how the film turned out. The guy who directed it never worked as a director again.
It has some redeeming features, but the later films are way, way, way, way better than it. The people I see praising the second movie seem to primarily be game fans who like the film because its plot loosely follows RE3. But that doesn't make a good movie. Extinction, the third film, is a far better movie by a far more talented director.
>later films are way, way, way, way better than it
later films are barely RE-adjacent. at least first two films had shit from games and some semblance of RE atmosphere. they went full retard after the second film.
Seeing this post made me realize how badly i want to see an actor dressed up as Chris punching a boulder
Uoh?
be honest, Ganker. would you?
I need to see her feet first.
Is this even a question? That dicky would be divine
Structure. Take RE1. 80% of that game is walking around, picking up items, pushing things, and reading notes. Doesn't translate very well into a movie. Then there's expectation. Say you're doing a "faithful adaptation" so now all of a sudden you, or more likely the studio, has dropped a fuck load of pressure onto everyone involved and a single deviation could make or break your movie. So the smartest decision is always homage. Take what makes a vidya work, and have fun with it. Unfortunately all too often we see that fun lost to the profit margin like we did the RE movies.
The problem with the RE movies are that they were all just action shit. The first 5-6 games were survival horror to a tee. Sure it had over the top bullshit in it like zombies, giant spiders and snakes and shit but the point is it was still survival horror. RE games didn't become action bullshit until RE4. So when the movies came out it was such a harsh clash to what people were used to when it came to Resident Evil. For a timeline reference, the first RE movie dropped in 2002. RE4 didn't drop until 2005, 3 years later. So the series was still survival horror back then, which is why it got shit on so badly. Personally, I liked it, but idk I have a knack for videogame movies so it doesn't say much. I also liked the Silent Hill movies even though everyone hates them.
I forgot to add that Apocalypse came out in 2004 as well. So that was 2 movies that came out that were just action-hero bullshit, that's supposed to be representing a gaming franchise that's survival horror, it just didn't make any sense.
>RE games didn't become action bullshit until RE4
lol wut. Anon RE1 you have an argument but even then after 2./3rds you're fucking everything with a shotgun and grenade launcher. RE2 has so much ammo that you can kill everything. Twice. and RE3 has an option to start you off with an assault rifle in EZ modo, while the main mode throws weapon parts and gunpower at you like its going out of fashion. The presentation changed in 4, it went even harder on the action elements. But lets not pretend here that the series hasn't loved that shit since its inception. Hell just to hammer it home here's part of the opening to RE1:
The game was still survival horror. It wasn't dudes with machine guns and grenades blowing up africans and mexicans while punching boulders and regrowing their limbs and shit. You know exactly what the fuck I mean, I even mention shit like the giant snake and croc and spider and you STILL choose to be disingenuous like a retard. The games weren't action-hero bullshit point blank. The movies were. It was jarring and the reason why it wasn't well-received.
>It wasn't dudes with machine guns and grenades blowing up africans and mexicans while punching boulders and regrowing their limbs and shit
True, it was just dudes with machine guns and grenade launchers blowing up cops and scientists with some Matrix running and 1v1 a chopper, Solid Snake style. I'll give you the bolder punching though. The old games never went THAT far.
Sony pushed for the RE films to be more action-oriented. This tactic worked for Terminator and Alien, so it sort of made sense.
I don't get why horror fans lose their shit over horror franchises abandoning horror. And I really wonder how Terminator 2 would be perceived today. It feels like nobody wants to acknowledge that Terminator 2 totally abandoned horror to immense success.
Is the first sequel the only one that cleanly transitions? They drop every hook at the end of all these movies and pivot into something completely different. Abandoning the Canada arc, abandoning the clones, Wesker is good, Wesker is bad, she has powers now, now she doesn't. The RE film franchise is a complete fucking mess.
Yeah. The third film onwards is just way out there with the whole planet dying. The 3rd film is a very guilty pleasure for me as I enjoy the premise and Mila's nips in that outfit make me lose my mind. But you couldn't pay me to watch any of the others again. Or rather you could but it would be DAMN expensive.
3d pig disgusting
There are time jumps for each sequel, but they do transition. For example:
The ending of Apocalypse has Umbrella able to remotely control Alice, and allowing her to leave. The zombie situation is supposedly under control.
Extinction opens with Alice on the run because she's afraid that if Umbrella locate her they can send her commands via satellite. Containment has failed. (In the script for the first movie, the Red Queen said that containment would fail within 2 months or so, a line that was cut from the film.)
Extinction ends with Alice talking to Umbrella's HQ who are located in Tokyo.
Afterlife opens with Alice and quite a few of her clones travelling to Tokyo and blowing the shit out of Umbrella HQ. Most of her clones are killed.
Afterlife ends with Umbrella attacking the ship Arcadia with a fleet of VTOLs.
Retribution opens with Umbrella attacking the ship Arcadia with a fleet of VTOLs.
Retribution ends with Alice in Washington and the final battle for humanity's survival is happening.
The Final Chapter, for complicated reasons including budget cuts and hasty rewrites and studio interference opens the next day, in the aftermath of the battle. The film cannot legally say what happened during the battle, but there is a direct continuity of sorts.
The Final Chapter brings up the clones again. I personally suspect they were going to have some kind of twist that the Alice in TFC is a random clone pretending to be the Alice from the previous movie. Isaacs has a freezer full of clone heads, and the reason he thinks THIS Alice is the real one isn't really explained.
The reason each film was unable to pick up directly from the previous one was basically issues with Sony. For example, Extinction was meant to have opening scenes with Jill and Alice and Alice leaving, but they couldn't get Jill's actress back due to a scheduling conflict, so had to rewrite the entire film to work around this.
>cleanly transitions
kys chud
YWNBAW
your brain rot is terminal
your axewound is permanent.
The first resident evil could be made into a faithful movie.
It just wouldn't be an action movie.
Action movies do better at the box office and that hack really wanted to shoehorn his wife into it so yeah
watch the CGI Resident Evil movies instead, they stick to the game universe.
there are four of them now
Five if you count Infinite Dankness.
because for some ungodly and absolutely FUCKING retarded reason they didn't want to copy the story of the games, even though that would've made the movies insanely popular
>some unknown reason
They didn't want to pay licensing royalties beyond the name. Deal with it nerd. The big boy execs are just smarter than you ok?
they hired a simp who just wanted to cast his gf and not Uwe Boll
I only watched the first two movies and they were alright even if they were nothing like the game. I really fucking miss late 90s/early 00s action shlock though. Rewatched the first RE and Blade and they just don't make em like that anymore.
Became a vehicle for Paul Anderson to keep his wife working. Originally shoehorned in actual RE characters to play second-fiddle to Alice and the occasional other shout-out to the games, but really the movies are popular enough in China they could have just dropped the RE stuff entirely by the third movie and they would have done just as well as a series of generic action movies.
Paul W.S. Anderson is a genius. He has figured out a way to have studios pay him money to film his wife in skintight outfits.
>Milla demands an obligatory nude scene, with nipples and bush fully exposed, in every movie she does
>Paul is not only ok with it, he enables it and films it himself
Based?
i loved Welcome to Racoon city
>director hired his wife and daughter and friend for his film
>"man i wonder why the films are so whacky"
Because the games have bad stories. In hindsight they absolutely made the right choice. The CG movies that take place between the games are mostly terrible.
sex
In order to make Resident Evil a viable movie franchise, they needed a central protagonist that didn't belong to Capcom. That's why Alice was created. And once they had Alice, they had to come up with a villain, which was Dr. Isaacs, who was a rewritten version of William Birkin. And things flowed from there. Each new movie was about Alice's ongoing journey of self discovery and her battle against the Umbrella Corporation and Dr. Isaacs. After Isaacs was defeated in the third movie, her conflict shifted to fighting Wesker, but the twist was always going to be that the head of Umbrella was herself, that she was just a copy who had completely gone off the rails.
In terms of adaptation, you have to look at what the original material offers. The characters in RE aren't very good. And they come with rights baggage. So some people have this idea about making Resident Evil movies about Jill and Leon and Chris and it's really not that appealing. Audiences have shown little interest, and it's creatively stifling.
Alice, or an Alice-like character is going to pop up in RE adaptations for the foreseeable future. That's why the ill-fated Netflix adaptation starred Jade and Billie Wesker.
Then the argument becomes why make them Resident Evil movies at all? Because they wanted to piggyback on the name for free publicity or no one would have gone to see their tbh kinda shitty action movies.
Seconding this.
If a property isn't a "viable movie franchise", it's better not to adapt it at all then make some trash that has nothing in common with it.
>Then the argument becomes why make them Resident Evil movies at all?
Because their job was to adapt Resident Evil. To keep the parts of Resident Evil worth keeping while throwing the parts that would just get in the way.
Why leave money on the table like that? There are lot of comics and games and books and stuff that have a few great ideas in a sea of shitty ones. Why not take the good ideas, rework them, and make a new version? That's how movies like Wanted got made. The original Wanted comic book is retarded. But it has some good ideas worth keeping. And you also avoid the risk of a lawsuit.
And yet what they came up with was action movies with RE characters awkwardly thrown in for no reason, since Alice does everything anyway. They could have just gone the route that Netflix show did and just have Wesker. He's the only one who comes close to having anything resembling an important role in them.
Wesker can't be the lead character. Capcom own him. That's why Jade Wesker is the main character in the Netflix show.
>And yet what they came up with was action movies with RE characters awkwardly thrown in for no reason, since Alice does everything anyway.
Alice does everything because she's the main character. That's how action movies work. The whole POINT of Alice is to be the lead character. When you watch a Die Hard movie, John is always the one who saves the day. These aren't ensemble films. These aren't about the power of friendship. One of the biggest sources of inspiration is RoboCop. Umbrella basically made RoboCop (Alice) and ED209 (Nemesis). When you watch a RoboCop film, who saves the day? It's always RoboCop, but some other characters are there to help sometimes.
In a recent interview, Paul mentioned that Retribution had reshoots at Sony's insistence because the original cut of the movie did not explain why was going on. It was a deliberately confusing maelstrom of set pieces where Alice stumbled from one test environment to the next. The scenes of exposition, and ALL the Red Queen scenes, were added in reshoots.
It's kind of wild that after the original movie team quit, they rebooted with Andrew Dabb and Johannes Roberts, and BOTH of them fucked up. It feels like it's only a matter of time before they go back and make another Jovovich film.
I didn't watch the new one because they made Leon a pajeet
That seems kind of petty. You should judge the film on its own merits.
Tolerating this blatant race-swapping of white characters just to shoe-horn diversity quotas should never be tolerated. If they want diversity, make new characters or, you know, use pre-existing ones like Marvin Branagh. They're doing it deliberately, it adds nothing to the product, they just want to trigger a reaction. If it was the reverse and existing non-white characters were being race-swapped to white, you can be damn sure we'd be hearing about it from every corner.
Paul W.S. Anderson is a huge, huge race-gender-blind casting advocate. I'm surprised he didn't race-swap anyone in the RE films. On his new movie, the "exceedingly fair" Lady Melange is played by a black woman. And the character "Ash", created for the film, was written as a man in his 40s, but swapped for a woman in her 40s after Anderson liked an audition.
So imagine if Anderson had cast a woman as Chris Redfield. Maybe Capcom just didn't allow that sort of thing. I've heard Anderson wanted to make Chris gay and Capcom wouldn't allow it.
Well he cast a gay actor to play Chris, so he sort of got his way
Why didn't they just hire Romero?
They got tired of Romero being uncooperative. Constantin Film tried very hard to make things work with him, and after they fired him, they were fully prepared to cancel the movie completely. But they caught wind of Paul W.S. Anderson, director of Event Horizon, having an alternate pitch.
It's sort of like how the original team for Bloodlines 2 got fired, they almost cancelled it, but then they heard another studio had a pitch.
>you lived long enough to see Hollywood fall so far and so hard that you're nostalgic for at least the first two Resident Evil movies
What an awful time to be alive.
I don't get why some people are so infatuated with the second Resident Evil movie. It was a mess. Milla Jovovich publicly apologized for how the film turned out. The guy who directed it never worked as a director again.
It has some redeeming features, but the later films are way, way, way, way better than it. The people I see praising the second movie seem to primarily be game fans who like the film because its plot loosely follows RE3. But that doesn't make a good movie. Extinction, the third film, is a far better movie by a far more talented director.
>later films are way, way, way, way better than it
later films are barely RE-adjacent. at least first two films had shit from games and some semblance of RE atmosphere. they went full retard after the second film.
They later even introduced Chris and Claire only to have them do literally nothing.
goyslop hollywood trash. first one was ok I guess.
the director had to insert his wife in the movies