Welcome to Raccoon City rating is an R for strong violence, gore

The Resident Evil film franchise starts all over again on November 24th with the release of writer/director Johannes Roberts’ Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a reboot that draws inspiration from the first two Resident Evil games and isn’t connected to the Paul W.S. Anderson / Milla Jovovich series. Now the Motion Picture Association has confirmed that Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City has the appropriate rating for a Resident Evil adaptation: they’ve given the film an R rating for strong violence and gore, and language throughout (via Film Ratings)

The film has the following synopsis;

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, the townspeople are forever… changed… and a small group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.

The cast includes Kaya Scodelario as Claire Redfield, Robbie Amell as Chris Redfield, Avan Jogia as Leon S. Kennedy, Hannah John-Kamen as Jill Valentine, Tom Hopper as Albert Wesker, Neal McDonough as William Birkin, Donal Logue as Chief Brian Irons, Chad Rook as Richard Aiken, Lily Gao as Ada Wong, Nathan Dale as Brad Vickers, and Marina Mazepa as Lisa Trevor. 

Roberts has told IGN,

The thing I loved about the games is they were just scary as hell and that is very much what I wanted to do. That atmosphere — it’s rain, it’s constantly dark, it’s creepy. Raccoon City is kind of this rotten character in the movie and that sort of atmosphere in the games I wanted to put in [the film]. … I’m a huge John Carpenter fan and I really took to that. The way he tells these claustrophobic siege movies and I took movies like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog and these disparate group of characters coming together under siege, and I took that as my filmic inspiration. We have two very separate locations but we split people off into their worlds. One is more of a siege movie style with the police station, and then you have the mansion which is creepy as f*ck.”

I still haven’t seen all of the Resident Evil movies Anderson and Jovovich made, I lost interest along the way, but I’m really looking forward to seeing Roberts’ take on the concept.