The RESIDENT EVIL franchise, despite varied opinions about quality, became a huge global franchise across six installments and the face of the franchise has been Milla Jovovich's Alice. The character was created for the films and was not featured in the Capcom game and director Paul W.S. Anderson has revealed how Alice came to be and why he had to fight to have her featured as the movie's main character.
During this weekend's New York Comic-Con event, Anderson revealed the creative process that led to the introduction of Alice and it's clearly a character he was invested in for the films:
"I've always been drawn to female-led movies. I like them. The films I've made, they quite often have strong female leads. When I first came to Hollywood, there was this belief that female-led action movies didn't work, because there'd been several that hadn't worked. And I just thought that was bullshit. I didn't believe it for a second. So I pushed very hard to have a female lead in the role. Resident Evil had been developed for a while by other filmmakers, who had had other screenplays written that never got made. They always had male leads. So I felt like it was time to try something completely different."
Once Anderson knew he wanted the story to follow a strong female character, Anderson also revealed why he decided to create a new character rather than putting someone like Jill Valentine or Claire Redfield in the lead for the films:
"If you look at the game, while the Alice character is not in the game, the archetype certainly is. There's a lot of very strong female characters that you get to play as in the game. By having a completely fresh character and telling a prequel story to the world of the video games, it gave us some more dramatic license that we wouldn't have had if we had just done a straight adaptation of any one of the games."
While some of the game's biggest fans were probably hoping for an adaptation more similar to the original games, the results can't be argued. The RESIDENT EVIL movie series has gone on to become one of the most successful franchises ever, grossing over $1.2 billion worldwide to become the highest-grossing movie series based on a video game. After six installments, Anderson said he and Jovovich have told the story they wanted to tell, and there doesn't seem to be any looking back with the pair's new focus on another video game adaptation, MONSTER HUNTER. RESIDENT EVIL is getting the reboot treatment with an all-new story and cast. This time, it will be much closer to the story of the original games, which is likely to satisfy some of the more diehard fans of the franchise. There is also an upcoming live-action series on Netflix that will follow Albert Wesker's kids living in a world ravaged by the T-virus.
Do YOU think it was a good idea to create an original character to lead the RESIDENT EVIL films?