Resident Evil Team Working On Monster Hunter Movie Series

The team behind the Resident Evil movie franchise is ready to move on to a new game.

Deadline reports that writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson and producer Jeremy Bolt are working on a movie series based on Capcom's Monster Hunter. The fantasy-themed gaming franchise launched in 2004 and is hugely popular in Japan, with dozens of installments and spin-offs across multiple platforms including PlayStation, Wii, and Nintendo 3DS.

Anderson (who said they started the process about five years ago) has written the script for the first movie, and the pair already have plans for a second. Although they'll first need to find a studio to back the ambitious project.

Anderson said the plot of the movie will follow a "normal American" who gets pulled into the parallel world of Monster Hunter. "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."

Bolt said the movies would have a very different tone from the sci-fi and horror of the Resident Evil flicks. "The game is a bit of Star Wars, a bit of Lord Of The Rings, it's a little more fantasy," he said. "We've found a way of connecting the Dune-like sand covered world of Monster Hunter with our world. So we're bringing this massive Japanese game into the world of America."

We'll have to wait to see if the duo are able to pull it off and get production started, but Anderson said the first movie would just be the beginning. "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," he said. "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."

Let's just hope the Monster Hunter movie doesn't end up on this list of video game movies that never happened.