Variety has “re-announced” that a Monster Hunter movie based on Capcom’s series is currently in the works with Paul W.S. Anderson in the director’s chair and Milla Jovovich set to star. All things being well, it might be turned into a big-screen franchise.
If those details sounds familiar, it’s because they are. Anderson was behind the majority of the fifty entries in the Resident Evil cinematic adaptations with Milla Jovovich playing Alice, the superpowered-but-sometimes-not protagonist. The pair are also married in real life.
The re-announcement of a Monster Hunter movie, which had actually been in the works as far back as 2016, is an unusual one for plenty of different reasons. The first being that it’s happening in the first place.
Monster Hunter is a series that has built itself on players making their own stories. While it does have a fairly robust lore, the emphasis has always been on the player to fill in the blanks and make their monster hunting their own. How is that going to work for a movie? If they’re going to essentially weave their own storyline out of thin air, why not just create something entirely original without the Monster Hunter name attached?
Paul W.S. Anderson is also not what you would call anyone’s favourite filmmaker. He certainly makes some entertaining movies, but judging from his Resident Evil series, he isn’t one to stick close to the tone and mood of his adaptation sources. Resident Evil started off fairly well even with huge deviations to the canon but eventually devolved to the point where every new entry felt like an even more convoluted nu-metal music video.
Financially, however, a Monster Hunter movie makes sense for Capcom. Monster Hunter: World has been massively successful with the franchise transitioning from cult to mainstream, so there’s even more incentive for Capcom and Anderson to strike while the iron’s hot.
Sadly, all signs already point towards the Monster Hunter movie doing nothing to break the video game movie curse, especially as its director made a head-spinningly edited sequence like this. Personally, I’m intrigued to see how it turns out if only to watch a young hero hunting 150 monsters on a quest to hunt ’em all.
The Monster Hunter movie will reportedly have a budget of $60 million and will shoot in South Africa this September. The latest entry in the series, Monster Hunter: World, has been a critical and a commercial success for Capcom as one of the best games of 2018.
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