Fans eagerly awaiting Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City were hit with some unfortunate news yesterday. As confirmed by distributor Sony Pictures, the live-action reboot of Capcom’s famed survival horror series has been pushed back until November. Fortunately, this represents a delay of just two months, but it’s disappointing, nonetheless, for folks itching to dig into director Johannes Roberts’ take on the franchise.
You can, of course, expect Screen Gems to whet your appetite with trailers and the like in the lead up to its theatrical release, but as a means of softening the blow right now, a new synopsis has been revealed which sheds further light on where the plot is headed. Check it out for yourself below:
Once the booming home of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corporation, Raccoon City is now a dying Midwestern town. The company’s exodus left the city a wasteland…with great evil brewing below the surface. When that evil is unleashed, the townspeople are forever…changed…and a small group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.
Nothing particularly revelatory here, then, though there are a few key points worthy of note, including specific mention of Umbrella. As a central antagonist of the games, the malevolent bioweapons manufacturer – which masquerades as a pharmaceutical company by day – has been known to play a key role for some time, though the above states that, by the events of the film, it’s already fled the scene of the crime, so to speak, leaving Raccoon City’s civilian population to fend for itself as its experiments break close.
The survivors being referred to are, of course, those we’ll all be familiar with by now. Claire and Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine and Leon S. Kennedy will all be present and accounted for in the movie, as will villains Albert Wesker, William Birkin and Brian Irons. How Roberts intends to have all of these major players interact with each other, however, remains to be seen. Leon and Chris, for example, don’t encounter one another during the initial T-Virus outbreak and only canonically meet for the first time many, many years later. Whether relatively small details such as these will be taken into account for the reboot, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City lands in theaters on November 24th.
