While all signs point to Constantin Films’ reboot of the Resident Evil movie franchise being much closer to the source material in terms of tone and narrative compared with Paul W.S. Anderson’s divisive six-part series, that outcome could have been drastically different had Scott Beck and Bryan Woods decided to pursue their own project based on Capcom’s revered survival horror video games.
The writing duo, perhaps best known for their work on A Quiet Place alongside director John Krasinski, have revealed in a recent interview with ComicBook.com that they briefly toyed with the idea of adapting Resident Evil for the big screen. Speaking to the site, Woods describes how the property, one of many to cross their desk, prompted the pair to explore how they would approach the source material, especially regarding its abundance of zombies – a trope, he says, that has essentially been overused to the point of exhaustion in modern cinema.
Recalling how they would have tried something unconventional had the project ever gone ahead, Woods says:
We thought the zombie genre has gotten so tired. We’ve just seen every iteration of zombies you could possibly imagine. So, how do you do something new? With Resident Evil, we were like, ‘Oh, maybe you could approach it like Sam Mendes approached 1917 and just do this insane, outrageous oner in the zombie genre with Resident Evil,’ which feels organic to Resident Evil because those games feel like one big piece of movement and sustained piece of suspense. That was the one thing that we toyed with for like, five seconds. But, outside of that, the thrill for us is just creating new ideas and new worlds.
An interesting take, to say the least, and while abstract, it could have made for an exciting spin on the zombie horror genre. While the timing simply wasn’t right back then, though, Woods and Beck say they’re still open to the idea of working on Resident Evil in the future. The likelihood of that coming to pass anytime soon is highly unlikely, however, as Capcom has already more than filled its quota for spinoff media.
Alongside Constantin’s aforementioned movie reboot, Netflix currently has a live-action TV show and animated Resident Evil series in the works, both of which are expected to drop sometime next year. For all the latest developments on each project, hit the respective links above.
