Resident Evil film boss slams bad game movie directors

The Hollywood movie director behind the Resident Evil films has hit out at the directors of poor video game adaptations.

Paul WS Anderson’s Resident Evil film series is the most successful video game to movie franchise around, generating billions in revenue across four films and there’s a fifth one due in September next year.

Anderson feels he has succeeded where so many others have failed because of his love for the franchise.

Speaking to MCV as Resident Evil celebrates its 15-year anniversary, he said: Despite what a lot of haters on the internet might say, I love the Resident Evil games. And these movies are made with a huge knowledge and real passion for the games.

A lot of video game movies are made by directors who don’t know the video games they are based on from a hole in the head. They don’t do justice to the games, they don’t immerse themselves in the games, they don’t understand what people liked from the games. And that is the wrong approach and clearly those movies don’t work.

You can fool people once, you know. I was excited to see the Tomb Raider movie the first time it came out. I saw it, it wasn’t very good, I wasn’t very excited to go and see the second film. I think with Resident Evil it is very telling that each movie has done better than the one before.”

Anderson’s Resident Evil movies are generally kept quite separate from the video game franchise. And he admits getting games and movies to work in unison is a big challenge.

You are also dealing with substantially different timelines,” he said. You can make a good movie in a year. You can’t make a good video game in a year. So it is very difficult for movie and game companies to really work together, especially when you can’t even guarantee that the game is going to come out when you say it is going to.”

For our full interview with Paul WS Anderson click here.