Earlier today, Sony Pictures Entertainment released the first official trailer for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (we refuse to capitalize the whole title), and as we expected, the film has us expecting the worst. Take a look for yourself to see what we mean.
Returning to the origins of the massively popular RESIDENT EVIL franchise, fan and filmmaker Johannes Roberts brings the games to life for a whole new generation of fans. In RESIDENT EVIL: WELCOME TO RACCOON CITY, 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, a group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.
If you take a look at the comments over on YouTube, the viewers seem fairly divided. On one hand, some Resident Evil fans are excited at how close the set pieces look like the original game from the 90s and recognize an appreciation for the clear B Movie quality this film is targeting. On the other hand, many are quick to point out that the film is filled with TV actors while the quality of the movie looks like something produced for an afternoon slot on the CW network… which we kind of have to agree.
While the trailer does justice to some callbacks to the game (such as “Itchy, Scratchy”), the CGI and the cast leave so much to be desired. However, after all the Jovovich films, it will be nice to see a story that actually follows the source material to some extent. Even further still, the cast is quite questionable and it’s hard to imagine that Johannes Roberts’ shortlist of low-quality films makes him qualified to take on a franchise like Resident Evil. Either way, this might just be a movie we wait to stream on Netflix a few months after its theatrical release…
Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia, Donal Logue, and Neal McDonough. The film is written and directed by Johannes Roberts.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is scheduled for theatrical release on Novemeber 24, 2021.
