Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, the latest live-action adaptation of CAPCOM’s survival horror IP, can now be watched across theaters in France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, New Zealand, and the United States, with other countries following suit shortly afterward.
Before the launch of the movie, director Johannes Roberts talked to Game Informer about the most challenging part of the film’s production. According to him, it was living up to the huge legacy of zombie movies.
Do you know what? The biggest challenge and, I guess most frightened I have ever been when doing this, was the zombie aspect – and I’ve never really realized it until we were doing the siege on the police station. The movie is very much influenced by Assault on Precinct 13 and uses that a lot as a touchstone to tell the narrative. We have this big siege at the police station. Suddenly, I was standing there, and the zombies all arrived, and suddenly you realize you have the weight of, like, 60 years of zombie movies on you. You’ve gotta get this s–t right, and you’ve gotta bring something fresh, and you’ve gotta scare again. When people have seen zombies – you know, they found them scary, then they found them not scary again, they’ve become part of comedy. They’ve become everything. That was really tough to be able to create a story that had a dramatic theme and was grounded to a certain extent. I mean, it’s very John Carpenter-influenced, so it has its own world. But within that world, you needed to be believable within the reality of that world and to scare people again and make them really fear the zombies and the whole armada of creatures that we let loose. So, that was very frightening. I remember that day super closely. I remember feeling, “Oh my God, if I f–k this up, I’m in real trouble. People are going to kill me.” The weight of that was huge. It was huge.
The early reception for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City wasn’t stellar, though. The RottenTomatoes critic score is at 27%, while fan reviews are at 61%. Metacritic’s Metascore is 44, while IMDB’s user reviews score is at 5.7 out of 10.
CAPCOM can at least take solace in the continued success of Resident Evil Village, which recently won the Ultimate Game of the Year award at the 39th Golden Joystick Awards alongside other prizes in the audio, PlayStation, and performance categories. CAPCOM itself won the Studio of the Year award.
