After years spent either producing or directing the Resident Evil franchise, you might think Paul WS Anderson would be ready to tackle something with just a couple of characters going through a coming-of-age story. But nope, he and producing partner Jeremy Bolt are tackling another Capcom video game conversion full of combat and creatures with Monster Hunter.
According to the pair, they will be shopping the concept, a first script (written by the director) and some still and VFX show-and-tell pieces to studios in the hopes of opening up corporate coffers to back this one. Given their commercial success with the Evil movies, we have a feeling they'll do okay, especially as they're promising to stick to a roughly $50 million budget with the help of Toronto-based VFX company Mr. X.
The Monster Hunter concept is a simple one: an ordinary bloke in a boring job discovers he is descended from a line of heroic line of, well, monster hunters... "The central characters are very relatable American characters. You take a person from the ordinary world who thinks they’re in a dead end job, they have no future, they feel like their life’s a failure, it’s going nowhere, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix," says Anderson. "It’s about a normal American who gets dragged into this parallel world, this Monster Hunter world. Then eventually the parallel world ends up coming to our world. So you have the creatures from the Monster Hunter world invading our world.
"The mythology is that basically monsters are real and all the monsters and creatures from our mythology, whether dragons or the Minotaur, or Chinese dragons, it’s all real. They were real. They really existed in our world. For every monster there was a hero that fought the monster. And then those monsters just disappeared, overnight. They ceased to exist, as did our need for heroes. They became a thing of myth and legend, but eventually the monsters will come back. Unless we have a hero to help fight them, our world with be devastated by these returning creatures, after we’ve chosen to put our faith in technology rather than heroes. All of our technology won’t mean anything once the dragons start raining fire." For more from Anderson and Bolt, head to Deadline.
According to Bolt, they currently have a plan for two films, and if they find success again, you know they're going to be riding this beast for a while... The latest – and last (for now) – Resident Evil movie, The Final Chapter will be with us on 3 February.
[Resident Evil: The Final Chapter targets August shoot
](http://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/resident-evil-final-chapter-targets-august-shoot/)