For months now, there has been absolutely inexplicable online discourse and faux controversy regarding Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil movie. After Cregger went to great lengths to discuss how the film’s tone and vibe had been inspired by specific games, like Resident Evil 2, a subsection of the franchise’s fans were apparently offended to find out that Cregger’s film wouldn’t be a straight-forward live-action adaptation of the game once some of the marketing material released. Aside from the fact that Cregger never claimed to be making any such adaptation in the first place and had remained pretty forthcoming about his approach to this film from the get-go, none of this was ever as big of a deal as some online outlets tried to make it out to be.
Like the politically colored discourse that surrounded The Odyssey before it, no general audiences actually care about whether or not Cregger is making a bit-for-bit remake of one of the video games or not. And as proof of that, the newest box office estimates show that all of this nonsense has been for naught, as Cregger’s Resident Evil is currently tracking for a great $35-$50 million opening weekend, with room to grow beyond that.
What has been so funny about witnessing the discourse surrounding this new film is the idea that these ‘purist’ Resident Evil fans are getting all riled up over an adaptation that is taking creative liberties with the subject matter. First of all, that’s how adaptations work; you get a creative individual who is (in the best of circumstances) passionate about or inspired by the source material and willing to make the changes necessary to adapt what works best about a given work from one medium to the next. But secondly, and most hysterically to me, there have already been like a dozen different live-action runs at Resident Evil, and the vast majority of them have been neither faithful to the games nor good. So it’s not as if Zach Cregger’s version is breaking some long-upheld sanctity of the canon; he’s following up Paul W.S. Anderson, for crying out loud.
But the other thing that has been so funny about all of this is that this very small but very obnoxiously vocal subset of fans have also been acting as Zach Cregger isn’t pretty obviously the biggest selling point of this film. The trailers have done a great job of differentiating this Resident Evil from prior adaptations by simply reiterating it’s from the same guy who made widely beloved modern horror classics, Barbarian and Weapons. That alone has been enough to get general audiences jazzed about this, and Cregger is the whole reason this film even exists.
All of that to say, I will be seated for any new Zach Cregger movie, even an inexplicably discourse-surrounded Resident Evil film. And it appears that I am very much not alone in that regard, as the film is tracking exceedingly well.
Add us as a preferred source on Google