Monster Hunter: Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil) working on the live-action movie
A few weeks ago, Capcom announced that a Monster Hunter live-action movie made in Hollywood was in the works. We didn’t get any details back then, and we still don’t have any right now, but an interview with Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt (writer and producer of the Resident Evil movies) reveal the pair is behind the Monster Hunter movie.
Here’s what Paul W.S. Anderson said about the Monster Hunter franchise as a whole:
What I love about Monster Hunter is the incredibly beautiful, immersive world they’ve created. It’s on the level of like a Star Wars movie, in terms of world creation. There are no real central characters so it’s a bit like when we first approached Resident Evil and imposed our own characters and story on that world. I think this is a perfect IP for us to do exactly that same thing again. The Monster Hunter world includes these huge deserts that make the Gobi Desert look like a sandbox, and they have ships that sail through the sand. These full-on galleons, but rather than sailing on the ocean waves, they sail through waves of sand.
You’re fighting these giant creatures, some as big as a city block. They live underneath the Earth and when they burst out, it’s like the best of Dune. You also have these flying dragons, giant spiders, the most wonderful creatures. That’s what really attracted me. I felt there was a fresh, exciting world that we could expose and build a whole world around, like a Marvel or Star Wars universe. Everything is about world creation, nowadays, and how can you build a world where you can have multiple stories going on? I thought this was our opportunity to have a cinematic universe.
In the interview, Jeremy Bolt reveals that he and Paul W.S. Anderson were the ones who went and asked Capcom for the rights (not the other way around). And it turns out talks for this particular project began about five years ago, so it’s definitely not something that suddenly popped up one day.
With how big the Monster Hunter franchise is in Japan, it’s clear that Capcom has high expections for the movie, but they also want to make sure that the team behind the movie would do it justice.
As for what that Monster Hunter movie will be about, here’s what Paul W.S. Anderson had to say:
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. 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.
Finally, we learn that they currently have two movies planned, that they’re looking to shoot in South Africa or China, and that the movie should have a budget of about $50 million (more or less the same as the last Resident Evil movie).
Unfortunately, we don’t know when the (first?) Monster Hunter movie will be released.
Source: Deadline
