WHAT WENT WRONG - Resident Evil (2002)

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

This week, Chris & Lizzie try to figure out how Paul W.S. Anderson saved his career, his love life, and Constantin Film (maybe just in the United States) with a lovable clunker of a zombie movie. They trace the origins of the hit game Resident Evil is based on (and the game that game was born from, and the movie that game was based on), untangle a creative love triangle between Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, and their director, and work through the complicated, mostly fruitless attempts to find synergy between the movies and video games. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one that begs the question, when do the raccoons come out? I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winnerbauer and Chris, what did you make me watch for today? I gave you the privilege of watching the first installment of the, you can't kill it, Shoot it in the head, Resident Evil franchise, which bears some resemblance to the games upon which it's based. And we're going to spend a lot of this episode actually talking about the games. It's got an interesting history, how the first game was developed. And then it led to this unusual film that kind of birthed a weird B-movie subgenre of its own.

So I'm really excited to talk about it. It's got some fun characters, you know, kind of some folks who needed a break and caught it at the exact right moment. But Lizzie, we got to start with what a treat it must have been for you to watch it. this last night. And what was your experience watching it? Had you ever seen it before? You know, talk us through it. Give us the blow by blow. So I had not seen this before. I thought that I had. Maybe because... You may have seen parts of one of them. There are many. Yes. And also her outfit in this is so iconic that I think that was burned into my head. You know, the asymmetrical red dress with the knee-high black flat boots. Great outfit. Very impractical for killing whatever the hell those

things are. But she looks great doing it, although she doesn't actually do much of it in this movie. We'll talk about that. There's a funny reason for that. Okay. So yeah, I had never sat down and watched this all the way through. And, you know, I started this pretty late last night. I was very tired. Yeah, you texted me. I saw the timestamp of your text and I thought, wild choice to start this that late the night before recording. Didn't have an option. We have been moving into a new house, many states away from where we used to live and 9.30 p.m. was the only time I could start watching Resident Evil. It is a movie. It's, uh, first of all, it's deeply confusing. I didn't know what was going on for like 70% of this movie. For something that is seemingly so simple, it almost felt like

you had to have played the game to kind of know what was happening. No, Chris is shaking his head, no. I think playing the game would help you that much. As we'll learn, this is not a direct adaptation of the game. Well, then what was happening? What do you think happened? I don't know. I don't know. Honestly, like, truly, I was so confused. I still am so confused. There's a Wuhan lab leak. They send in the team. That part I got. The lady gets her head chopped off by the elevator. That was fun. Amelia Jovovich's Alice has memory loss from the halide or whatever comes out of the smoke detectors. But who is she? Why is she there? Who is James Purifoy? What the fuck was their relationship? Also, what happened to James Purefoy? I liked him a lot when he was around. He's very good in Vanity Fair, that movie was Rees Witherspoon. And then he just disappeared off the face of the earth. And I don't know why. So anyway, where did he go? He's not great in this, but that's not his fault. I just found it to be both stupidly simplistic and deeply confusing at the same time. That being said, has fun performances. I love Miliovovich always. I think she's a very good actor and she, you know,

holds this down as well as anyone possibly could. If anyone's never seen the messenger where she plays Joan of Arc, she is actually like great in that. Kind of a mess of a movie, but she's very good. And yeah, I was just, I was just blown away by how little sense it makes. You know, like, I'm okay with there not being a lot of logic in movies like this. Or rather, I'm okay when the logic doesn't relate to our real world logic. But I expect some logic to exist within the world itself, even if they're making it up. And that just doesn't happen here. Like, it was bizarre. Do you want me to explain a little bit of what happened? Yes. Because it seems like it never really connected for you. They do hide the ball for most of the movie, but they do eventually explain what's

going on. Do they? Yeah. There's a compooper. There's a computer. Eric Mavius's sister, the police officer's sister, works in the lab. Yes. She was secretly meeting with Miloovich. I know. Who has a front with James Purfoy as the couple that owns this mansion, right? That's actually the secret entrance to the facility that goes under Raccoon City. Miliovovich and the scientists were working together to expose the corporation.

James Purfoy heard them coming up with this plan, so he decides he's going to steal the T-virus for himself. That kicks off the events of the movie. He infects the entire lab. He then escapes. But before he's able to escape, he's knocked out by the gas, which causes a memory loss. And so he and Miliovovich wake up as the Stars team, special tactics and rescue services, bust in and bring them down to exterminate the viral infection down below and blow up the whole thing eventually. Get the antidote and leave. That's the setup.

Okay. I understood, like, 95% of that. I think actually the part I was most confused by was James Pierfoy and like what? Yeah, I mean, they don't do a great job explaining him. No. I understood that he was some sort of double agent. Kind of. Yeah.

It just, it's like, I don't know. Also, why is everything so fucked up when she gets out? Is it because the virus got out? Yes. When did that happen? Well, you don't see it, but it did. That's presumed. I mean, they bring Eric Mabius is infected when they bring him out at the end.

Yeah, but. And they're saying like, get him to the Nemesis program. So he clearly must have infected someone. But they didn't feel like they needed to show. Anyway, whatever. Okay. I don't think that was necessary.

This movie is very confusing. That part of the movie, I don't think it's confusing. Okay, fine. But it was very late. It was very late in the game. They do a big reveal, like you're saying, very late in the game. I didn't love it. I didn't love it.

I thought I would have loved it. What if you turned that corner to, but it was great? No. It was not great. And I like this kind of movie. So I was actually quite surprised, how little I enjoyed this movie. I do always enjoy a Michelle Rodriguez action movie performance. She is always great. And I like Eric Mabius a lot. Where did he go also? Two of these guys.

Where did they go? They were great. They were fun. I would say he and Mila Yovovic really hold this movie down. Anyway, Chris, that's enough of me being incredibly confused by what I watched at 9.30 p.m. last night. What about you? I saw this movie when it came out roughly around this time. It is kind of one of a litany of post Matrix science fiction rip-off films, I would say. You could throw equilibrium in there. Aon flux, perhaps with Charlie's Throne, the Karen Kuzama film that we covered, ultraviolet, also with Miliovovich. There are many of these films that I think came out after The Matrix and were deeply influenced by The Matrix and yet felt candidly like bargain bin versions of The Matrix to a certain extent. Big time. This is like a bargain bin 28 days later. Well, it came out before 28 years later,

So I don't think you can technically say that. I'm still going to say that. So I didn't love it. And yes, in relation to something like 28 days later, this fell distant second. However, as more and more of these came out, Apocalypse, extinction, afterlife, the final chapter, the final chapter, final chapter, you know, whatever the version is. There is, I find sort of a guilty B, C, Z movie pleasure in these movies. And the downside of this one is actually not ridiculous enough. the movies start to become so absurd that I enjoy them more and more, the more ridiculous they get.

You know, Miliyovic ejecting the magazine from her gun or dropping her gun and then jumping to the ground to grab it and shoot the bad guy before they react. It's the most ridiculous move in action movie history. Give me more of that. But I think they realize that eventually, you know, when they're making these movies and we'll talk about kind of the continued evolution of these movies during the legacy portion, all to say, I still enjoy, again, the time. Time passed quickly for me watching this movie, even though I agree with you, it feels a little shoddy, you know, throughout. Even though I like sequences and I like, I mean, the whole beginning feels like it's something out of Final Destination or Ghost Ship or something like that.

It's very fun. And then the movie kind of grinds to a halt for a little while and you kind of wonder, why are we withholding so much information? And then I do think the ending gets pretty fun when it just becomes a creature feature with the liquor, you know, at the end, the big tongue creature. I agree. Beginning and end, totally fun. The beginning I was actually excited because I was really enjoying.

it. It was giving like bootleg contagion, which I'm always here for. Very much enjoy that. But yeah, that middle, like the middle two-thirds of the movie are pretty rough. I'm surprised. Well, I think this is the hardest thing about adapting a video game is what do you do with Act 2? The second act of a video game is a character either defeating increasingly difficult bosses or completing increasingly difficult puzzles. But they're not marked typically by remarkable story turns, right? It's a linear progression through a sequence of escalating challenges. And I think that that's a really tricky thing with video game adaptations. I don't think they cracked it here necessarily. We'll talk about the process of writing the script. I think that's the section of the script that they struggled with

the most. And we'll talk about a couple of other writers and their approaches. And maybe they would have worked better. And I read other versions of the script, Lizzie, and I can pitch them to you. And you can tell me if you would have liked them more. But all to say, I still kind of enjoyed it. Do I think it's good? No. Would I ever recommend it to someone? No. But if it comes on, I probably wouldn't turn it off. And that's where I land with Resident Evil. And so I'm excited to get into it today. Yeah, I'm excited to hear about this process too. And you know, you make a good point about when this came out. I think now, because this type of movie is so ubiquitous, it's easy to be like, wow, that was not good. But considering it came out before 28 days later, that makes more sense to me as to why this did end up spawning a film franchise. I was very confused about that when watching it because it just seemed like a bit of a dud, if you will. But tell me more. Chris. All right, let's talk about it. Before we get there, the details. Resident Evil is an action-zombie science fiction video game adaptation, written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.

The other one. It was adapted from the Capcom game of the same name, produced by Burned Eichinger and Constantine film of Germany. It stars Emiliovovitz as Alice, Michelle Rodriguez as Rain, James Purfoy as Spence, Eric Mabius, as Matt, Martin Cruz, as Kaplan, Colin Salmon as one and many. Well, a few. More, it actually has a pretty contained cast. Yeah, I was to say not that many. It was distributed by screen gems in the United States, and it was released in the United States on March 15, 2002.

As always, the IMDB Logline Reads. A special military unit fights a powerful, out-of-control supercomputer, and hundreds of scientists who have mutated into flesh-eating creatures after a laboratory accident. Okay, you know what? I know what it is. I know what the part of this movie is that confused me the most and felt like such a redirect. It's the computer. Sure. I was just very deeply confused about what proto mothers. The files are in the computer. Yeah. Yeah. I felt like Zoolander in this movie about what her motivations were and what her

function was. Yeah. I mean, it seemed like it was to contain the virus, but then in other times it did not seem like that. That, I think, was the biggest sticking point for me is what is mother doing. I know it's not mother. There are some kitchen-scent qualities to the way this was written, and we can get into perhaps the motivations for the inclusion of specific elements, especially given the success of films that immediately preceded Resident Evil. So the sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to. We had a really fun time deep-diving this one. Resident Evil oral history set secrets from its 15-year run from Inverse. That also includes a lot of really fun facts about the later films, which we're not going to talk about. Fangoria Magazine's 211th issue from April of 2002,

To Phantom Limbs, Dissecting Horrors, Lost Sequels and Remakes by Jason Jenkins. This is a really fun book. The PlayStation Magazine May and June of 1998 releases Resident Evil behind the scenes, the DVD featurette. Also, I just want to recommend the director. The audio commentary for Resident Evil is very funny. It's Miliovovich and Michelle Rodriguez and Paul Anderson. And Miliovovich, like, forgets they're doing a commentary at one point.

And it's just like, wait, what are we doing here? Is this a commentary on this movie? She at one point, I believe she says that if enough people see the movie, she'll get implants at one point in this thing. It's very funny. So if you guys are interested, check it out also many, many more articles, retrospectives, interviews with those involved in the film. So Lizzie, let's talk about how a relatively straightforward, I would say computer game, video game, console game, became one of the most confusing movies you've seen in recent years. I will preface all of my complaints by saying that I was very tired. So it may be mostly my fault. No, no, no, no. No, I'm not that dumb. It is kind of unnecessarily convoluted.

There's no reason to withhold certain reveals as late as they do in the movie, in my opinion, too. Well, Lizzie, in some ways you could trace Resident Evil back to a seminal film of the late 1960s, shot in black and white for almost no money on the East Coast. What am I talking about? Oh, oh, Night of the Living Dead? Night of the Living Dead by George Romero. And if you're interested in the evolution of zombies as monsters, you can listen to our primer episode to search zombies. Exclamation point in our feed, we will put a link in the show notes.

But practically speaking, Resident Evil was actually born far east of where we are right now, far from the American East Coast, in Japan. Okay, that makes sense. It's based on a Japanese video game. But that video game, Lizzie, never would have been. existed if it had not been for a video game that preceded it called Sweet Home, which was not sweet, but it did take place in somebody's home. And this video game was based on a movie. So in January of 1989, Toho, which we talked about during our episode on Seven Samurai, released a horror

film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. No relation to Akira Kurosawa. I mentioned Kiyosha briefly, Lizzie, when we were doing our review of obsession, because there's a couple of shots in obsession that direct homages to Kurasawa's film Pulse, which was adapted in the United States with, I think, Kristen Bell at one point, and wasn't great. Okay. Curasawa is one of the masters of kind of slow burn J-horror of the late 90s and early 2000s. His movie Cure is pretty amazing. But Sweet Home was much earlier in his career.

1989, it was produced by Juzzo Itami. Now, Itami is also a big producer. He's an actor. He's a director in his own right. He actually has a role in this movie. kind of the gas station attendant who warns our heroes from going to the haunted mansion. Great. It has a lot of Western themes to it.

Yeah, he's wearing a lot of prosthetic makeup. You go, why is this like 40-year-old man dressed like a 70-year-old? So the IMDB logline reads, a TV production crew is making a documentary about the infamous painter, Mamia Ichero. When they start filming at his old home, they come under attack from the ghost of the painter's wife. So I watched this movie in preparation for this episode. It's very fun. It's basically a pretty direct rip-off of Robert Wurper.

wise is the haunting. Okay. If you've seen the 1963 version of that film. I may have seen a remake, but yes. Yeah, there was the remake in 99, I believe. But anyway, so, you know, camera crew, five people, basically, they go to this house. It's a haunted house. They're looking for these frescoes that are supposedly in this house. This painters died 30 years ago. They find this beautiful fresco, but then in other rooms, they find these really horrifying frescoes. And what they slowly realize is that the spouse, the wife of Ichiro, was opening the furnace to, you know, heat up the house in the morning. And when she wasn't looking, her child, her toddler crawled into the furnace. She started the furnace, accidentally burned her child to death, went insane,

and then started luring other children to the home to burn them in the furnace so that her child would have friends in the afterlife. And then the townspeople murdered her by throwing her in the furnace. It's gnarly. Whoa. All right. It's also for the first hour, I would say it's pretty tonally jarring because musically, it plays almost comedic. But then for the last 40 minutes, it's great. And it goes full poltergeist and it is so fun. Nice. All right. I would highly recommend it. If you guys are, you know, fans of Curr or Polsor, you know, Kurosawa, try to check it out. It's on YouTube. This is, again, a little more down the middle. It's like Poltergeist, the haunting Alice in Wonderland. But it's got a few unique Alice.

So producer Juzo Itami's father was Monsaku Itami, who mentored Shinobu Hashimoto, who wrote Seven Samurai, Fun Connection. Second, Oscar winner Dick Smith did the special makeup effects, and they are great. Amazing. Yeah, he's an absolute legend. Yeah, The Exorcist, we talked about recently. Giro wrote to him to become his mentor. Third, the movie's got a tie-in video game.

It's going to be released the same year for the Japanese console system, the Famicom. That stands for Family Computer, and it was Nintendo's original console released in 1983. The American version, Lizzie, released in 85, was eventually called the Nintendo Entertainment System or the NES. Got it. So in the United States, video game tie-ins at this point had a pretty bad reputation, and they would for a long time. There's a really notorious example that we have actually mentioned on the show, which was the ET, the extraterrestrial tie-in game for Atari. Yes. So this was released in late 990s.

I actually read that they had to develop it in something like six to eight weeks in order to make it to market in time. And it was a massive flop. So released in 1982, same year as the film, E.T. becomes the highest grossing movie of all time. And then there was a rumor that this game sold so poorly that they actually dumped all the extra copies in a landfill. Yes. That actually ended up proving somewhat true. The magnitude of the number of cartridges dumped was exaggerated. However, they did dig them up eventually and realize, well, there's a lot of cartridges down here.

An excavation of the ET cartridges. Some historians have even cited this game as a contributing factor to the 1983 video game crash, which sent the industry in the United States into a recession through 1985. This recession was bad, Lizzie. So home video game revenue dropped more than 90 percent from 1983 to 1985. Listen, if you're going to make a bad video game, you want to make sure it's... Yeah, tank the market. Tank the market. Make sure it's bad enough to literally ruin it for everyone.

That's right. So again, very broadly speaking, video game tie-ins have historically been considered, you know, low-quality cash grabs. I would put them a level or two below novelizations of films, for example. When video game designer Tokuto Fujiwara joined Capcom, he wanted to design arcade games. So Arcade games, Lizzie, often used high-end, custom hardware, way too expensive for the average home to buy, but they then had better graphics. They could do more sophisticated things. Consuls were cheap, but consoles were kind of starting to win the market. So Capcom had started in the arcade space, but with the success of the Nintendo

entertainment system, they started to pivot. So Fujiwara had worked on 1985's Ghosts and Goblins, which was an arcade game that we don't believe featured any ghosts, but did have a lot of zombies and maybe some goblins. It was a hit on arcade, and then it was a smash when they ported it, meaning they transferred, they made a version for the console system. So they have to make a version that works on the lower quality hardware of the console system. Street Fighter is released in arcades through 1987. That gets ported.

And then all the sudden, around this time, Capcom gets split into two departments, arcade games and console games. This is a bit of a surprise because before it was just, look, we'll develop it for arcades and then we'll create sort of a downstream version for consoles. So now they're saying, no, we're going to develop stuff straight for consoles. It would almost be like a studio saying, we're going to do stuff for theaters, and then we're going to independently do things for home video. Perhaps a way to think of it.

Okay. So Fujiwara was apparently pretty stunned. They were going to make games for the Famicom system. And then he got assigned to run the console division. Not exactly what he's hoping to do at this point in time. He's working on Mega Man 2 and he hates it. Quote, I wasn't earning a daily income. We didn't do any location testing.

We didn't get to interact with players. The hardware was a step down from what I was using before. not to mention the fact that I'd originally wanted to make arcade games. All this made it hard for me to see the change in a positive light at first. This podcast is sponsored by Built. Guys, Bilt was an easy advertiser to say yes to because it means you earn points on every housing payment. That is the biggest expense for the vast majority of us. I know it is for me.

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Your housing payment, again, it's one of your biggest monthly expenses. Why wouldn't you want to earn points on it? So download the Bilt app and join the membership for where you live at joinbilt.com slash wrong. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash wrong. Use our link so they know that we sent you. So Fujiwara is working in the console division and they get the assignment to make the sweet home video game tie-in,

which from one perspective could be seen as the ultimate demotion. Not only are you not making arcade games, but you need to make the weird video game tie-in for this random horror film. And then all of a sudden, Fujiwara realizes something. With horror, the limitations of the hardware became an asset. So as one interviewer of Fujiwara wrote, even though primitive hardware makes for poor graphics, it means that you don't run into issues when making games with extreme content. With advanced hardware, you can show off more realistic graphics,

but the better the graphics get, the stricter the sensor. When it's somewhat obscured what you're showing, or maybe you're implying, you're not going to be censored as strictly as if you're working with a more high fidelity graphic system and it's more clear what you're showing. It's a little similar to the way Alfred Hitchcock tried to hide the ball with Psycho, for example. Yeah. These aren't the breasts you're looking for. Right. They're black and white breasts. You can't see them.

That's right. Black and white bitties. So in Sweet Home, players can burn maggots, for example. something he pulled from the movie, and the creative freedom didn't end there. So, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the director of Sweet Home, told Fujiwara, look, don't worry if the game follows the movie exactly. So he wasn't just porting the movie to the home video game console, he was adapting it with his own voice. So the game was released just under a year after the movie in December of 1989. Now, we weren't able to find specific information about how much money

either of them made, but some sources suggest the game was generally considered better than the movie. And it was well received by critics in Japan. And if you wanted the true original version of Sweet Home, you had to go with the game because producer Juzo Itami went behind Kurosawa's back and re-shot and recut portions of the movie after the theatrical release. So for context, he was married to the movie star, Nobuko Miyamoto, who's great. She becomes kind of the unexpected heroin in the third act of the film. There's a lot of aliens imagery as well. She does not have children, but she's going to save the surrogate child from the queen, you know, at the end of the movie. Sure. There's a big aliens riff in this film. Let's argue there's quite an aliens riff

in Resident Evil as well. Oh, we'll talk about how it used to be even more before. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So Kurosawa sued Itami for these changes, which according to Tom Mez and Jasper Sharps, The Midnight Eye Guide to Japanese Film, Very Fun book. That was something you did. not do in Japan at the time. And Kurosawa, actually, I read, was somewhat blackballed in the industry for a little while. So the theatrical cut remained unavailable. And I believe to this day remains unavailable. Also, sidebar.

Atami had a tragic end. It was believed that he died by suicide in the late 90s, but I think they later revealed that he was murdered. What? That somebody faked his suicide. Is it unsolved? I think there was something of a confession, but I don't know if it's ever been 100% officially solved, but yeah, it's pretty nuts. Fujiwara's vision, though, reached Holmes untouched.

And according to Fujiwara, nearly everyone agreed that the game was scarier than the movie. But neither of these versions of Sweet Home reached the United States. One possible reason was that the gore that Fujiwara was hyped about including didn't go over well in the U.S., which was starting to favor more kid-friendly games. Like, what super famous pair of Italian plumbers? Super Mario Bros. That's right. Mario and Luigi, Chris Pat and Charlie Day, which Hollywood wanted to turn into a movie. And Lizzie, that movie released in 1993, which your husband and I covered, didn't do so well.

No, it's insane. You can check out. Bob Hoskin says Mario is still the weirdest casting choice of all time. You can check out our episode for more details, but just for now, it grossed less than half of the nearly $50 million it cost to make. Yeah. And the LA Times review of the film started with, no offense, Nintendo, and closed with this. Does it make sense to make movies from video games?

Of course, it makes commercial sense. Given the massive international popularity of the four Nintendo Mario Bros. Games, this movie is virtually pre-sold. But a built-in audience should be a challenge as well as a reassurance. I would argue they took that challenge too far because the problem with the Super Mario Brothers movie is that it is unrecognizable, I would say. to the fans of the game.

However, in the span of 11 years, the video game industry had taken the highest grossing film of all time, E.T, and turned it into a game that tanked the video game industry. And Hollywood had taken the most successful home console franchise of all time and turned it into a movie that tanked

the careers of its directors. Yes. Maybe video games and movies just didn't mix. So back in Japan, Sony's gearing up to release its fifth-generation console, the Sony PlayStation, Like the Sega Saturn and eventually the Nintendo 64, 3D graphics are the key to these systems, Lizzie, and Fujiwara sees an opportunity.

What if he could make a horror game that was not hamstrung by graphical limitations? What if he could do everything he'd wanted to do with Sweet Home but hadn't been able to do? What if he could do something so scary that survival horror games could be a genre in and of themselves? So he enlists a game designer, Shinji Mikami, who loved Sweet Home, but didn't think this type of game would sell well. In fact, nobody at Capcom did. The studio would apparently assign new hires or people with extra time on their hands to work on the game, just called the horror game at this point.

It reminds me of Shrek, where they just get the sort of bench warmers constantly on this project. Yep. McCami described the experience as the opposite of getting special treatment, but Fujiwara didn't care. He had a vision. And that vision was zombies in an old mansion. Now, Mikami claims that the zombies were his idea. He said that initially he thought it should be ghosts, but then he realized there wouldn't be any real feeling of exhilaration if you were shooting at or attacking ghosts. That makes sense. Bullets probably aren't going to stop a ghost. So he needs a monster,

and that's when he remembers what seminal late 60s black and white movie shot on the East Coast to the United States? Lizzie? Night of the Living Dead. Actually, the sequel. I tricked you. Don of the Dead. George Romero's Donna of the Dead, which is in color. And that wasn't the only cinematic inspiration. He also loved the idea of pulling from jaws for the combat system, specifically at the end, the boat's sinking. Brody gets the oxygen tank into the shark's mouth. He shoots it blowing up the shark, he wanted the player to feel cornered. Basically, he didn't want the player to be on the offensive. The player should be on the defensive throughout the entire game. Great. There was also one more direct inspiration that we should credit, roughly a year earlier than this, a French game

studio, InfoGrams, or I believe it's Infogramis, released a game called Alone in the Dark. Info Wars. Yeah, Info Wars. Yeah. It took place in a haunted mansion full of creepy crawlies, and it drew a lot of inspiration from Romero, but was mostly based on the writing of H.P. Lovecraft is a very sort of Cthulhu Lovecraftian survival game. Alone in the Dark is considered by many to be the first 3D survival horror game. And according to its designer, Frederick Reinal, they took the game to the Japanese publishers before it was finished to explore a Japanese

release, including Capcom, and Mikami played it. And basically years later admitted, when he played it, he realized, oh, Resident Evil shouldn't be a first-person game, it should be a third-person game where the environment would be presented with a fixed camera and then the 3D character would move around it and that got around the hardware limitations that they were running up against

and trying to make it a first-person game. The point is, for the first six months of development, Mikami works on this game by himself. He gets another planner, then he loses him. But after nine months or so, people started coming around, and eventually they have more than 50 people working on what is now being called biohazard.

And then they made another creative choice that may have led to some beliefs that the game could perform well overseas. All the characters in the game were going to speak English. So the Japanese version includes subtitles, but the game is set in the United States, technically, and all of the characters have American names. So Capcom actually did record Japanese voices,

but they ultimately shelved them because, quote, they did not fit with the horror setting in a Western-style building. So by late 1994, PlayStation gets release. Capcom U.S.'s office starts mapping out their marketing strategy for the game. They're going to call it Biohazard until Chris Kramer, who works in PR at Sony at the time, says it's not going to work in the U.S. There's already a game called Biohazard in the U.S. So they hold a company-wide contest to come up with a new name. And there's a ton of submissions.

And the marketing team loves Resident Evil. It's a great name. Chris Kramer hated it. He was like, put zombies in the title. What is Resident Evil? Is it about an evil doctor? What are we talking about? But the marketing team,

convinced Capcom, Japan, and the name stuck. Kramer says the person you came up with the name was a designer in the Capcom digital studios, the first U.S.-based development group at Capcom, but we actually could not find this person's name. So if they are out there and they would care to share or take credit, send us an email, what went wrong at gmail.com. Anyway, March 22nd, 1996, Biohazard is released in Japan. It keeps the name Biohazard in Japan.

Roughly a week later on March 30th, Resident Evil is released in the United States. They expected it to sell 200,000, 300,000 copies. It's exactly what happened. Only it sold 200,000 copies immediately and reached a million units in the first year. The game spreads like a zombie plague. People would play the game. They tell their friends how terrifying it was.

There were other horror games released that year, including Overblood. But as one critic put it, why isn't it a better game? One word, mood. Resident Evil was dripping with it. All right, so Lizzie, the plot of the game you play is either Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield.

You are special operatives with stars, special tactics, and rescue, I believe it's services, and then they changed it to squad for one of the movies. You go in because there is some sort of outbreak in these woods. You make your way to the mansion. The first military team was killed. You get into the mansion. And there are all of these zombies at first that are scientists that have been mutated by the T-virus, but it's not just zombies. There are lots and lots of different monsters, giant snakes, giant spiders, zombie sharks, hunters, giant superhuman dudes called the tyrant at the very end. It is a monster mash.

Great. Capcom rushed a sequel into development, Resident Evil 2. They're like, let's crank this out one year later. They said, that's too fast. They said, fine, you can have until January of 1998, which seems basically just as fast. It's a huge hit. People love it, including director Paul Anderson, who at this point is going by Paul Anderson. Gee, why did he have to change it?

We'll talk about that. At this specific moment, Lizzie, he may have had a lot of time for video games. So born Paul William Scott, I like the idea that he also could have been Sean William Scott. Born Paul William Scott Anderson in Wallsend, England, the man we now know as Paul W.S. Anderson, originally just went by Paul Anderson. He'd broken into the British television scene in the early 90s. He was a writer on the crime dramedy series, El Cid. I've never seen this, but it sounds really fun.

Actually, Alfred Merlina plays a recently retired criminal investigation department officer who moves to Spain to run a bar with his older detective partner. Turns out there's all these British expats living in Spain, including some of the ones that they previously jailed. And so they end up kind of watching over and investigating these guys and continuing to do their investigative work in Spain, even though they're supposed to be retired. All right.

Funny riff on the El Cid title. 1992. He and his producing partner, Jeremy Bolt, co-found a production company. They raise $2 million and they make Paul Anderson's debut feature film shopping. Lizzie, have you ever seen or heard? heard of shopping. No, I have not.

It takes place in a sort of dystopian version of the UK where everybody is either a cop or like a dilapidated thief slash Mad Max style car thief. It exists along the axis of films that kind of arc toward the Matrix over time. I would include something like Catherine Bigelow's Strange Days, you know, in that range, for example. I think it's notable for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's Jude Law's first dramatic lead role. He is very young.

He's very cute. It has a crazy cast, Sean Beane, Jason Isaacs, Sean Pertwee, Ralph Ineson is in this movie as well, Sadie Frost. Okay. Jason Isaacs. Am I wrong or does- He's in Resident Evil at the very end? Yes.

Okay. I thought I saw just his eyeballs above his mask. That's just his eyes above the mask. So recognizable. Okay. Well, because he's in Event Horizon too, right? He's an old collaborator of Anderson. Got it.

That's right. And he also does the voiceover at the beginning of Resident Evil, explaining the umbrella Corporation. So this movie, you know, I watched it last night, and on the one hand, it feels like a first feature in that the story's pretty aimless for much of it. It doesn't kind of congeal until the end. But I think the actors are all very good. It's a truly stacked cast. It's ahead of its time. He clearly has an eye for talent. And given the $2 million budget, it's got an incredible amount of scope. This has some pretty remarkable car crashes. It's basically about the subculture of disenfranchised, you know, British youth who steal cars and then drive them, like, through the

front windows of stores after hours and then rob the stores. They blew his brothers. Yeah. And then they rob the stores and they leave, but they just don't play music. And it's got a pretty nihilistic downer ending. I got to be honest, I enjoyed it. I actually, in a weird way, I think it has more personality and style than a lot of Anderson's later films.

It feels like it has a little bit more of a perspective. There's some funny jokes, you know, as well. There's a part where Jonathan Price plays the cop in it. And Jude Law is talking to him as Jonathan Price is, like, tossing, you know, his van to try to find something to pin on him. And Jonathan Price says, like, what do you think this is? And he goes, I know my rights. I've seen L.A. Law. And he goes, is that funny to you? And he goes, well, no, it's more of a comedy drama. And he just totally missed the interpretation. But anyway, according to Anderson, he said the movie was very controversial. I'm not sure how true this is. But he did say that the BBFC censors had a problem with the film and it kind of struggled to get a release. And it kind of eventually gets a release in the UK. It only goes. straight to video in the United States. But the point is, it did lead to him,

eventually, I believe, getting representation in the United States and a very important screening at CAA. So it screens at CAA, and according to producer Lori Appellian, who was looking for a director to direct a specific movie, they could not believe how good this movie looked for the budget. But Appellian said that they thought it was shot for something like $100,000

on the streets of London, which is a lot different, than $2 million. Now, maybe they're being hyperbolic. I'm not sure. But it seems like they thought, wow, holy crap, this scrappy kid out of the UK made this very impressive Blade Runner-esque madmax-esque movie for almost no money. And Lizzie, the movie that they were looking for a director for was the adaptation of Mortal

Combat, the video game. Have you seen Paul Anderson's Mortal Kombat adaptation? No. I have a confession to make to our audience, which is that. I did not grow up playing video games at all. Oh, I presumed you didn't. So I tend to not have a strong connection. This is a pretty big blind spot for me in movie genres, is video game adaptations.

Oh, well, just let it wash over you today, Lizzie. Just let the knowledge wash over. I did. It washed over me and right through. Yeah, there it is. It's all going down the drain. Mortal Kombat, Lizzie, is very silly. I think that's actually its strength.

It knows it's ridiculous. I think it's pretty fun. It's very absurd. It's a fighting game. It's a fighting tournament game. There's not much more you need to know than that. There are obviously with two more recent remakes that they did with Carl Urban in the most recent one. Anderson pitches on the movie and says, I know tons about CGI.

CGI. CGI? Cig why? I'm the CGI guy. And then he goes to the store and he buys a bunch of books on CGI. Yeah. So he can learn the terms of CGI. One funny story to illustrate kind of how little he knew at this point.

apparently, according to the Hollywood reporter's sort of oral history on this production, and we'll cover this film at some point. When they were shooting the fighting scenes, he didn't fully understand that you didn't use the wide shots beyond just establishing the geography of the fighters. And so he kind of assumed, well, we have to get the whole fight right in the wide shot. And so they kept doing all these takes of the wide until finally one of the stunt coordinators or someone turned to him and said, Paul, do you know what coverage is? He goes, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, totally.

Let's go in for the close-up. And then they just kept going through it. You know, you got to learn somehow. You do. And I think he learned a ton. Anderson was given 10 times the budget that he'd had on his first film, but that $20 million was about half of what Stephen E. D'Souza had to make Street Fighter, the other fighting game turned into a movie the year prior.

There were a lot of rewrites on Mortal Kombat. There was a lot of improvisation, and it made a lot of money. Lizzie, Mortal Kombat made $120 million against its $20 million budget. Nice. The critics were mixed, but like for a video game film, honestly pretty decent reviews, especially at the, the time. And the fans seem to generally like it. I believe it had an A-minus cinema score, which remained the highest adaptation of a video game score for quite some time, I think until 2018.

It outperformed Street Fighter, which was also financially successful, and all of a sudden, there's this one-two punch of video game adaptations that worked in the market. So the question remains, Lizzie, why would Paul Anderson have time for video games in the late 90s if he'd just helmed the most successful video game adaptation of all time in 1995? It should have been the busy, guy in Hollywood. And the answer is, he turned down the sequel, Mortal Kombat Annihilation, to direct a couple of science fiction films. So, the two movies here, I think you may have seen one of them. The first ended up being Event Horizon. Have you seen Event Horizon? Yes, I've seen that. I actually quite like Event Horizon. It's very fun. I think it's somewhat underrated.

Yeah. This movie was destroyed by Paramount and Post. The studio cut a half hour after some of the test screenings went poorly. They pulled the release date up drastically to make room for Titanic. on the schedule. They stripped out a ton of the gore and graphic content due to some of the not-so-great test screenings, and it gets dumped in August of 1997. It bombed. And then, even after it did well-on-home video, Paramount tried to get Anderson to do like sort of a director's cut, but the footage was lost or destroyed because some of it was stored in a salt mine in Transylvania. Oh. But that's fine. He's got his next film ready to go. In fact, he was going to shoot it first before Hervent Horizon. It's called Soldier. Kurt Russell's going to be the lead. He's been trained.

training for a year. They start shooting. Kurt Russell breaks his left ankle and then the top of his right foot during the first week of filming. Just snaps it right off. Didn't need it. Didn't have his feet anymore. He's had fake feet for years. So Soldier bombed even worse. It made $15 million against a $60 million budget. Oh no. Oh yeah. This is a big bomb. So Anderson, who'd made the most profitable video game adaptation ever, all of a sudden was on a two-film losing streak. And he got obsessed with Resident Evil. He disappeared into his apartment. He did not return phone calls, and he didn't just play the first game. He played the second game, too. He emerges from his fugue state and calls up his producing partner, Jeremy Bolton, says, we have to make this into a movie. There's only one problem,

was he? The movie was already in development. How do we know this? There was a sticker on the cover of Resident Evil 2 that literally said, win a part in the movie, exclamation point. He missed that sticker. No, he saw it and said, can I win the directing part? In early 1997, German film producer, Berned Eichenger caught some of his employees playing video games in the office, specifically Resident Evil. Now, he's the CEO and chairman of German film studio Constantine Film, technically new Constantine films. So Constantine Film founded in West Germany in the 50s was actually behind a lot of really

successful American releases. It was a distributor for a lot of American films. And then they released a lot of German films, became their kind of own little studio system. They co-financed a bunch of spaghetti westerns. They actually provided financing for the Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood, Man with No Name trilogy. But they'd gone bankrupt in the 70s. They'd get bought out by Eichinger and his partner, Bern Schaefer's. They then have a bunch of success in Europe, not so much in the United States.

Neverending story would be one bright spot in the United States, but that had come out in 1984. And their attempt to get in on Hollywood's early 90s superhero craze had resulted in the unreleased, fantastic four that they made with Roger Corman. technically they only made it to retain the rights to the characters. The point is they're looking for a way to expand Constantine's presence in the United States. And Eichinger sees horror action thrillers as the perfect vehicle to do this. And these movies, there are a number of successful examples that are relatively affordable. They perform well overseas and they do well in the United States.

Like tremors, for example, Army of Darkness, from dusk till dawn, even something like Cube. Blade hadn't come out yet, but Blade would fall into this model. Same with like Alien 3 or even Alien Resurrection. So in early March of 97, Constantine buys the live action rights to Resident Evil. They've got a plan. It does not include Paul Anderson. So they hire Alan B. McElroy to write the script. Now, he was behind one of the more successful comic book adaptations of the 90s, Spawn.

Did you ever see Spawn with Michael J. White? Long, long time ago, yeah. Yeah. Look, amazing special effects, some great action. I don't know if the story, you know, kind of completely works. But I do think it was kind of an early prototype of what a comic book movie could be. You could certainly see Blade. as an evolution of spawn in a lot of ways.

Yeah. So McElroy's on the rise. He had just gotten new agents. The call comes in from Constantine about Resident Evil. Turns out Constantine's film offices are across the street from his new agency, walks over for a meeting, pitches producer Robert Colzer. You know, his take, according to McElroy, is very faithful to the game. Within a day or two, he's hired.

He writes two drafts. In September of 97, he tells Starlog and Fangoria that they're building a logical spine for the story of the game, a strategic rescue team that has to go to a medical research facility where something has gone terribly wrong. And in June of 1998, a writer at PlayStation Magazine claims to have gotten their hands on a copy of McElroy's leaked second draft of the script. And then this writer leaked the story in PlayStation Magazine. Here's the 30,000 foot view. Raccoon Forest, strange animals are mutilating campers and park rangers. A SWAT team, not Star's team, is sent in and quickly destroyed. The government gets involved. They recruit

Wesker, who's in an insane asylum, who recruits a team based on specialties. We get some of the characters from the game, Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, but they're different than in the game. They touch down in Raccoon Forest. They get attacked by mutated dogs. They get to the mansion. Things ratchet up. There are giant wasps, tarantulas, and of course, zombies.

Apparently in the first draft, they weren't zombies. They were psychopathic, cannibalistic scientists who could still talk. Ammo runs lower and lower. Chud. Yeah, it's chud. They find those scientists. They were supposed to rescue, but it's a trap. Their scientists are trying to.

spread the T-virus to the world, and they're going to use the rescuing SWAT team to do so. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. Jill and Chris get the antidote, the escape before the building explodes. They get chased by the tyrant who's a mutated Wesker. The tyrant is a big bad from the game. They defeat him, take the antidote, and they walk off into the sunset. Okay. It's somewhat like the game.

There are weird changes. Stars from the game becomes a SWAT team. They omit the umbrella corporation from this draft for some reason. And the reception seems to have been mixed. Here's the biggest problem with the draft. I read another summary of this online. They don't get into the mansion until like 60 or 70 pages into the script. Dumb question.

When you say the mansion, because they also don't really do anything in the mansion, in the movie that I watched, is it actually happening inside of the mansion? Or is it the same thing where it's kind of underground underneath it? It's both. There's a mansion section first and then the medical facility underneath it. But there's more in the mansion in this version. So I think the big problem is they're spending a lot of time. They introduced the team.

Honestly, the way it's described, it feels so much like Armageddon structurally. So if you remember Armageddon, act one break, I need my boys. Fun and games. I found my boys doing all their things everywhere. They're all totally unqualified for this. Somehow they got halfway across the world in the last 24 hours. Exactly.

One hour in, we're launching for the asteroid. That is the structure that this version of the movie seems to more or less be following. Well, I liked Armageddon, so I can't say I wouldn't like this. I don't know. Darmaghan's two and a half hours. I don't know if I want two and a half hours of Resident Evil. No, you're right. I don't.

I barely made it through an hour in 40 minutes. Yeah. So that may have been a problem. The leak may have been a problem. Another problem is that the second game was released, as we mentioned, on January 21st, 1998. And it seems like because the second game really opens the world up, it's not limited to the mansion. We move into Raccoon City.

We introduce additional characters. Because it's opening the world up, I think the adaptation that McElroy has written just of the first game perhaps feels too small, too contained, may not feel big enough, ultimately. As producer Robert Coultser later said, Macquarie did a pretty good job. You read it and said, I've seen this movie before. Then the second game comes out. And all of a sudden, your movie based on the first looks really dated and boring. And you say, what do we do now?

So, what they do is they go to the guy that revived the zombie genre to begin with. Enter George Romero. Yes. Turns out, Lizzie, George Romero was already involved in Resident Evil. Back when McElroy was getting started on his adaptation, Romero was directing the live-action commercial for Resident Evil 2. Oh, okay. He shot it at Lincoln Heights Jail,

which is a famous decommissioned jail in L.A. that we've talked about on the show. It's been used in a ton of films and music videos, American History X, The Roof, Con Air, A Nightmare on Elm Street, the boiler room scenes. It starred Brad Renfro. It's fine. It's very 90s.

It's very fun. A fun thing about Resident Evil is that in the first game, they actually shot live-action cutscenes for the game, and they starred a number of American actors, and so there was sort of a cinematic lineage with Resident Evil already. So I think McElroy later kind of nailed the appeal of Romero when he said,

maybe they thought that Romero's name value would give them more of a marketing push, which I do think is entirely fair. The godfather of the zombie genre, which inspired the game to begin with, is coming in to direct the film. In a sense, Constantine was actually throwing Romero a lifeline, As we discussed in our primer,

zombies movies had fallen out of favor by the late 80s, and in the early 90s, they're pretty much direct to video fare. His last two films, his first post Day of the Dead, had flopped. So you had monkey shines

in the dark half. And according to documentary and Rob Coons, Romero had this 10-year period where he was basically paid a development deal at New Line Cinema, and nothing he developed ever came to fruition. Everything kept falling through repeatedly.

And video game movies are suddenly the hot thing following Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. Got tomb, Rater, Duke Nukem, Interstate 76, Wing Commander, which would eventually get made. Did you see Wing Commander with Matthew Lillard and Freddie Prince Jr? No, I didn't. But, you know, the one video game adaptation that I have a real soft spot for is Laura Croft's Tombrader.

And weirdly, I like the second one with Jerry Butts. Pandora's Box. Pandora's Cradle of Life, yes. Pandora's cradle of Life. Doom is also funny if you've never seen it with The Rock. It's a pretty wild one. Macro actually wrote a draft of Doom. Final Fantasy, which they would eventually make the spirits within, and of course, Resident Evil.

So after a decade in development hell, I'm wondering if Romero thought, look, Resident Evil could be a sure thing, or, you know, as close to a sure thing as I'm going to get. But apparently he was hesitant, and I wonder if it was in part because this movie had to be for a broad audience, and his zombie movies were extreme. I mean, Night of the Living Dead was unrated. Dom of the Dead was rated X, and Dea the Dead, which was shot on a lower budget, was unrated, and part of the reason it was shot on lower budget is that he wouldn't commit to an R rating. And so Romero finally relents. He comes on board. His plan is to go for a hard R rating in the United

States and, quote, shoot it balls out. So somewhere in the world, there will be a harder version of the thing, and maybe we can put it out on a director's cut or release it in certain countries where restrictions aren't as tight, end quote. Okay. Now, Lizzie, like you, he did not play video games. So he watched his assistant play through the game. And then he sat down to write, You can find this version of the script online. He wrote it with Peter Grunwald. It's pretty darn fun. It's a pretty faithful adaptation.

It's 96 pages. Okay. It is a tight hour and a half like the game. It's set primarily in the Spencer Mansion. He does make some changes. So Chris Redfield, who's originally one of the Stars members, he changes to a local half-Native American man who's in a romantic relationship with Jill Valentine, who is a Stars operative like in the game.

But the general arc, you know, stars. team is overrun in the woods. Second team led by the eventual bad guy, Wesker comes in after them. They all end up in the mansion. They fight a bunch of monsters. Eventually a bomb's going to go off and they have to escape. It's all there. And there's some fun self-referential moments. Like one character Speyer says, Christ, this is like Night of the Living Dead at one point, which I thought was pretty funny. I think it's closer to the game than McElroy's draft. And it's basically got all of the monsters from the game. So you've got the zombies, the T-virus infected scientists. Great. Give me more monsters. Yeah. You've got Cerberus. That's the Dobermans, who do end up

in the Anderson version. Those I did enjoy. Yeah, they're very fun. You've also got infected crows, the hunters, which are these giant ape-like lizards, zombie sharks, and the B-O-Ws. These are bio-organic weapons. There's like a room-sized snake called Jan, which is just a great name, a room-sized plant called Plant 42.

And then the final big bad, the tyrant, who's this nine-foot-tall superhuman monster with one enormous claw hand, who will come into later Resident Evil movies. Yeah, it does feel like the 28 Days Later franchise is pretty heff. Dilley borrowing from the game, not so much the movie. We'll get into that at the end of this. They are absolutely ripping this off more than I realized. So, Romero's script is not super original.

The first act, have you ever seen The Crazies? His movie about Small Town, the infected water supply from the downed military plane. They did a remake with Timothy Oliphant. That was pretty good. The point is, the first act really does feel like the crazies, right? You've got the military coming into a small town to cover up some sort of accident that's gone wrong. That's fine.

That's so many movies. Of course. The aliens vibe. are a plenty. There's Vasquez here called Rodriguez, which will eventually be Rain, played by Rodriguez in the Anderson version. Yeah, Michelle Rodriguez. There's the sort of Bill Paxton-esque character, you know, it's got Deep Blue Sea scene, it's got an Anaconda scene. There's so much of these other movies running through it. But it's, I think it's fun, it's funny, it's quippy, it's very silly, it's 95 pages, it's action-packed, but I think it would be extremely expensive. This is a creature feature

with a half dozen enormous monsters. Romero apparently wrote multiple drafts and the project stalled. Now, Romero claims that Capcom liked it, the LA branch of Constantine liked it, but burned Eichinger did not like it. That's certainly possible. That's one version of events.

Robert Colster believes that Romero's version was just too extreme. They wouldn't be able to get an R rating. They wouldn't be able to show it on television. It would have landed in the X section of the video store, not the expansion into the US that Constantine was looking for. I mean, I think that's open to interpretation. there was nothing about the draft that felt more extreme to me,

but maybe if I had seen the way that Romero planned on shooting it, that might be true. It just sounds like it's very expensive. I mean, the number of monsters you're talking about. It sounds extraordinarily expensive. Yeah. So one secondary source claims that Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto told Electronic Gaming Monthly that, quote, Romero's script wasn't good, so Romero was fired. I don't think that's the case because Romero's script seems just as good as Anderson's to mind,

just in terms of being a script, but that's just my opinion. My guess is that all of this may have been true, but that The Matrix is what changed everything. So the Matrix was released in March of 1999. Resident Evil is dying, and all of a sudden, what an action science fiction film is has changed. The bar has changed. Constantine has likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars

developing this material. They can't keep paying writers. It's not like they can keep, and then Paul Anderson just said, I'll do it for free. Do you want it? I'll do it for free. Did I mention I'll do it for free?

I'll do it for free. Sorry, that was Paul Anderson interrupting. Okay, it wasn't exactly a clean handoff. Anderson has implied that there were a number of filmmakers in the mix and that they may have kept Romero on until they could find a replacement, which wasn't immediately Anderson. So director Jamie Blanks also pitched on the project, Lizzie, he just directed Urban Legend,

which was critically panned but commercially successful. He ran a couple screenwriters on, Cormack and Marianne Wiberley, they did Charlie's Angels full throttle, they'd eventually do national treasure. Great. According to Blanks, they get a little bit down the road, but then the Wiberley's bail,

when their agents say, look, our clients aren't going to work for free. And Paul Anderson just says, this is no problem. I'm going to keep working for free. So here's kind of the timeline we've pieced together. It seems like Anderson got in contact with Constantine. He had a relationship with them.

They talked about developing other material. And they said, look, we're doing a Resident Evil with Romero. And so Anderson decides to write his own spec script in parallel, called Undead, which he described as a, quote, terrible rip-off of Resident Evil. Quote, it's like I was going to make a version that would probably get me sued. It had exactly the same elements, the mansion in the woods, underground laboratory, big corporation, doing genetic testing. Here's me reading between the lines. It seems like Anderson wanted to write something that ideally, if things fell apart with Romero, he could slide in and say, Constantine, let's go.

But if Romero's version worked out... That's different enough that he could do something else with it. He could do something else with it. Yeah. I believe that's what's happening here. There's a suggestion that he may have known that things weren't going well with Romero at this point in time. Again, this is just a suggestion. We could not confirm it, but there is a suggestion that maybe he knew there was a pretty good chance it was going to fall apart.

And that if he had a script ready that was spec, he would have a pretty good shot at getting it in there in the door. Now, his scripts, because of this, is a wild departure from the games. from the earlier drafts. It doesn't contain any of the human characters from the game. Aside from a couple of the monsters, it's also much more limited in who the bad guys are. So you've got your zombies, you've got your Cerberus, your Dobermans, and then eventually you've got the liquor,

who is a creature from Resident Evil 2, not Resident Evil 1. Now, Anderson claims that his version is a prequel to the game. That's what he says. He says that he did it so that he wouldn't have to honor any continuity of the game, so that it would be surprising if they killed certain characters who are not in the game. I don't entirely buy that. I think that he wrote it not as a prequel, but as a standalone. And then he just called it a prequel later. That's again, that's my interpretation. He says that it was intended as a prequel. But what's interesting is there are

homages that he's putting in this movie that Alex Garland uses it in 28 days later. So the story centered around Alice, an homage to Anderson's favorite book, Alice in Wonderland. We talked about how Boyle and Garland used Alice in Wonderland as a reference for the third act, the mansion sequence. When Hannah and Selena are wearing the dresses, I believe Hannah's wearing a red dress as she's running around the mansion at the end of that movie. Yes. So his justification for Alice's memory loss at the beginning of the movie, I think is actually pretty interesting. He said that he wanted to recreate what a gamer feels like, waking up in an environment where they know nothing about what's going on, and then arcing toward becoming a kick-ass commando who has to save the day. I again actually think that's a pretty good justification.

So, I've never played this. Alice did not exist. Not in the game. Great, got it. None of the main characters existed in the game. Rain, not in the game. Spence, not in the game. Now, they hint at other characters, you know what I mean, from the game, but they are

not characters from the game. Okay. He cites Alien as a reference. Yeah. I, again, think Aliens is the reference that he's looking for here, but he says alien, specifically Tom Scarratt dying and that being surprising. Well, and the computer. Yes, the mother.

This is where, again, I see the Matrix as. such an influence. The way that Anderson introduces his world where the ubiquity of the umbrella corporation is so pervasive, it feels not unlike Morpheus saying the Matrix is all around us as he's talking to Neo and using the idea of a malevolent AI that manifests as a child. You know, it feels like both a horror trope and a Matrix trope. And again, I think that what Anderson is doing by kind of shoving cyberpunk elements into this story is trying to fit it into a post-Matrix world where this is the type of material that a lot of producers are looking for. That's not a quote from him.

Sure. That is my guess based on what I've read. So Anderson claims Constantine is very excited about his script. I don't doubt it. His script is also far more contained and budget conscious than the Romero or Macquarie drafts. It just is. I mean, just the elimination of all those big bads alone, the giant spider in the Macquarie script, the giant snake, the giant plant.

Like one of those would be enough for one movie at this size. And so his, I'm guessing, is going to be half as expensive. He apparently signs his contract. He flies straight to Japan to meet with Capcom for their blessing. Now, before he was even attached, there were a lot of rumors about who would star in Resident Evil. Would Samantha Mathis play Jill Valentine? Could have been cool.

What about Jason Patrick or Bruce Campbell? Oh, yeah. Zombie Maestro. As Chris Redfield also would have been cool. We can't confirm any of those rumors. But we do know that Anderson and Constantine did not seek out Mila Yen. Miliovovich. Miliovovich sought out Resident Evil. Nice. Kiev-born model-turned-actress, Milovovich broke out with what movie in 1997 that we covered,

and you were not a huge fan of, Lucy. Didn't love it. Fifth Element. But by the late 90s, things had cooled down because her second collaboration with her then-husband, Luke Bezon, which you just mentioned? Luke Besson. Which movie did you mention with Milovovich that you said you thought she was good at? The Messenger. The Messenger, the story of Joan of Arc, was released in 1999. Lizzie, some quick hits. We're going to give this movie its own episode. Originally, Bezon was an EPI on Catherine Bigelow's take on this movie, Company of Angels, which we talked about when we were covering Tank Girl. According to Bigelow, eight weeks before filming, Beisone realized that Jovovich, his then wife, was not going to be cast as Joan. So he dropped to the movie and polled financing. Wow. Bigelow threatened to sue him. They settled out of court, and then Besone started his own Joan of Arc project with Jovovich as the lead. Bigelow's movie fell apart. They made The Messenger. It underperformed financially, received mixed reviews, and Yoavich was actually disappointed in how her performance was edited in the final film. She did not feel that the movie represented what she'd brought on set. It's a weird movie. Have you seen this in? Yeah. I have. It's kind of like a very artistic interpretation of Joan of Arc in a lot of ways. generous. Yes, I do think she's good in it. She is good. But the movie itself is a total hot mess. Also,

do you remember that this, for some reason, there were like multiple Joan of Arc? There's also the Lili Sobieski, like, made-for-TV one that came out around the same time. Yeah. I wonder what was in the water that we were all about Jean-Dark at that point. I don't know. It seems like Heovic wanted some more control over her career. She and Bison divorced in 1999. Yay! Thank God. She's about to get a big upgrade in her life in a couple of ways, I know. So she and your younger brother were big fans of the Resident Evil games. And she actually didn't want to just be in the movie. She wanted to produce it.

But when she saw the cover of the second game and it said, went a part in the movie. She realized, oh, darn it, it's already in development. So she learns that there's a quote, really hot young director attached. That's the quote. And I just love, I wanted the Hansel. He's so hot right now.

That's how people are describing Paul Anderson. So she calls up this hot young director. He is very cute. He is very cute. She says, I want to be in your movie. And he says, great. Why don't you come in and read? And she goes, excuse me?

I was the lead of the fifth elephant. you're going to ask me to read for this movie? And he goes, yeah, she goes in. And she goes, oh, he's pretty hot and young. And I was like, oh, and that was the beginning of the rest of my life, end quote. So, Amelia Jovovich lands the role of Alice. She's an obvious fit for the material. I can't think of anyone who looks better with a gun in her hand, except maybe Michelle Rodriguez.

Yeah. So Michelle Rodriguez had just broken out with her big break film, Girl Fight. Have you seen it? Yes, I have. Yes. Really good movie. Yes, it is. Performed very well at Cannes.

She had shot the Fast and the Furious, but had not released it yet. She liked the game, but she also wanted to learn how a science fiction movie was made. It's very interesting. She's like a very curious person who was really interested in the mechanics and the business of filmmaking as well. So she tells Paul Anderson, look, I don't care, and I love this speech. I can't do him a shower with Biggest Voice. I don't care if I'm selling a hot dog as a zombie in this movie. I have to be there for the experience.

And it turned out to be the best three months of my life. It was fierce and liberating. and Anderson was smitten, not romantically, but creatively. He totally fell in love with Michelle Rodriguez. Quote, Michelle is just an incredible acting talent, and she looks great with a machine gun in her hand. She loved the video game and is so passionate about the film, so he starts to rewrite the script with her in mind.

He gives Rain a little bit more to do. He gives Rain a little bit more to do. Until, according to Yoavovich, quote, Paul rewrote the script for her. It pretty much made my character the girl, and Rain was the guy. She got all of my big action scenes and she became like Alice. And then Alice became this tag along.

Yes. End quote. It's true. Michelle Rodriguez has almost all of the action in this movie and she's very fun. It is a little strange. Alice does just kind of like drag her hot red dress through this movie and does almost nothing. She kills some dogs. Yes.

Apparently it was actually more extreme than that. So she read this new draft on a flight from Canada where she, She had just wrapped another project. She's on her way to Berlin where they're going to shoot the underground scenes of Resident Evil. And she lands and she is pissed. She goes to Anderson's hotel room and she says, we have to have a big talk or I am going to be on a flight home tomorrow morning. I will drop this movie.

So they sit down for three or four hours. They go through the script page by page. And every time that she came across something that had been changed from Alice to rain, she'd say, okay, why is this changed? Can it go back? Now, I do think it's still tipped toward rain, probably, ultimately. but it sounds like it was even more extreme than it had been before. That's so crazy also because Milo Jovovich was definitely the bigger star at this time.

So this is what Jovovich had to say. Not exactly. Rodriguez had more heat. Now, Yovovic was probably more known, but because she had had the flop of Joan of Arc in 1999 and, you know, probably a public divorce. Got it. She was slowing down. Whereas Girl Fight had just blown up at Cannes.

And the hype is Rodriguez is in the studio movie, the Fast and the Furious. she's going to be great in that. So Yovovich says basically, like, I was the hot new thing four years earlier, and Rodriguez is all of a sudden usurping me as the hot new thing. Now, a couple of things on pre-production. Richard Eurisich, who'd done Event Horizon,

also Blade Runner, Star Trek, the Motion Picture Mission Impossible 2. He comes in as VFX supervisor. They scout all over the world, but they get sold on Reichstag station in Berlin. That's the staircase that they go down, and they shoot in a bunch of the U-Bahn stations down there. Basically, like, the U-Bon system was divided during the Cold War.

They separated the East and West portions of them. Sure. And then they were connecting them after the Cold War. So a lot of areas were actually still shut down and hadn't been reopened yet. And so Anderson said they could just kind of shoot wherever they wanted. And they got all this production value for it. Oh, wow. The team also did a lot of their own stunts in this movie.

They did three weeks of training under former Navy SEAL James Butler. He'd also worked on Boys in the Hood. And they had a release date, October 26th, 2001. And they had a title, Resident Evil, Ground Zero. Great. That title will not stand, but that is the title they had. They kick off production in the winter, early winter of 2001. Oh, I know why that title won't stand.

Oh, no. Hold it. Okay, on the positive side. They're shooting in an abandoned U-Bahn system. They can shoot without having to shut down traffic. On the negative side, Yovovic is in a tiny red dress underground at the end of winter. Yeah, in Germany. It's cold.

She said she's literally freezing. She was wearing this little red dress. She was soaking wet. You look at the camera crew and everyone's wearing massive jackets for hand warmers and gloves. Yovic later said that the big joke on set was that at first the makeup team was painting the bruises,

but after a while they were covering the real ones up. Because of her dress, she couldn't wear pads on her elbows or her knees. Yeah. Anderson said that she worked six-day weeks, trained on the seventh day, and during the one weekend she had off, she went to shoot a L'Oreal commercial in Paris.

Oh, my God. And she later said, when I do L'Oreal, it's like, Miss Yovovic, is everything okay? Are you feeling all right? and then the next day I'm back in the flooded lab freezing in my miniskirt. For the zombie makeup, Anderson enlisted special effects makeup company animated extras International, limited, led by Pauline Fowler. She'd actually done Event Horizon with Anderson.

They did the Kill Rathie and Wing Commander, if you guys were interested in watching it. For the Undead Movement, he hired movement coach Warner Van Eden, who had played a band leader in Swing Kids. Lizzie's secret favorite movie. No, Newsies is your secret favorite movie. Yes. Anyway. And James Purfoy said that the zombies were.

actually legitimately terrifying. They brought in trained dancers to play many of the undead, which again reminds me of Danny Boyle bringing in athletes in 28 days later. Yeah, the movements, too. There was a lot watching this. They're not as fast as 28 days later, but they got some speed on them. No, no, they're like medium slow zombies. And there is a- Yeah, they're twitchier than the Romero ones. There's a quality to the movement that I think does kind of get us the next step of the way to Alex Garland's. I agree. Animated extras also did the dog makeup. These are real Dobermans, for the most part, wearing suits of netted fabric covered in prosthetics. The dog Alice kicks, to be clear, is a full-sized dummy.

She does not kick a real dog. Can't imagine she would. Now, they apparently couldn't put makeup around their mouths because the Dobermans was just go and lick all the makeup off their mouths. Speaking of licking, Fowler's team did the practical versions of the licker. So the liquor is often CGI. Yeah. And that's the big creature.

But the practical versions look great and they're huge. They did a three-quarter scale model for the close-ups of its face and jaws. You can really tell, though. You see the difference, I agree. Yeah. Unfortunately, that's one of the things where it doesn't, it just doesn't look good. Like, the CGI just was not. No, the CGI is in transition here.

Yeah, I agree. It's not quite up to snuff. When it is the model, which you can tell, it does look totally great. When you can see its brain, all that stuff, like, that's awesome. But, yeah, as soon as it, you know, you get the wide of it crawling, you're like, oh, well. Yeah. So in June of that year, either at the tail end of production, roughly, Laura Croft's Tomb Raider hits theaters.

Critics were not as high on the Angelina Jolie vehicle as Lizzie Bassett was. Well, it's not good. Merciless. Yeah, this is one of the worst-reviewed video game adaptations along with something like Super Mario Bros. I mean, have you seen it recently? No, not recently. I saw it in theaters when it came out. I enjoyed it.

It's not good. Her accent, not good. It's crazy. It's crazy. And you know what? I don't care. I don't care at all. I liked it. I liked her flipping around in her giant mansion and, you know, with her pole vaulting. I don't care. I don't care. She looks great. Well, fans were very mixed, but the movie actually did pretty well. It did well enough to spawn sequels. Yeah. Well, one sequel and then reboots. But yes, it brought in nearly $275 million against its $15 million budget. But according to some people involved in this production, they said that kind of like the talk around the town is that it was being painted as another example of a female lead action movie flopping.

Interesting. So like LaFem Nikita, Cutthroat Island, which we talked about, Taint Girl. Eon Flux. Aon Flux would be later. Yeah, yeah. The Long Kiss Good Night. Now, zombies also hadn't been popular in over a decade. Part of me wonders if the original Macquarie script moving it to psychopathic cannibals had been a.

an attempt to distance itself somewhat from the zombie genre, which, again, had not quite been rebirthed. That would make sense. The sort of fantastical creatures that are popular right now are wizards with the upcoming Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Also wizards. Wizards and hobbits and goblins and more. Less wizards, more lizards.

That's what they said for Resident Evil. So with two days of shooting left in Toronto, and I believe these were either pickups or reshoots based on the schedule that we were able to find, Anderson boarded a plane in New York to head to the production. That plane, according to Anderson, was one of the last to leave American airspace before it was shut down completely following the terrorist attacks of 9-11. Oh, no. So that shoot got delayed for roughly a month. This is, I believe, Alice walking out into Raccoon City at the end of the film.

Yeah. It was actually a very impressive pull-out shot to show all the destruction around the street. So the release date gets pushed, obviously. You're not going to release this October 26 now. And they can't call it Resident Evil Ground Zero. Yeah. The interim name I read was Resident Evil Genesis, which I'm guessing they probably changed because of the Sega Genesis, but I'm not sure.

And around this time, Paul Anderson lost his name, Lizzie. So Paul Thomas Anderson had registered as Paul Anderson with the WGA. Paul W.S. Anderson had Paul Anderson locked up with the DGA. And so now that's why we have Paul Thomas Anderson, PTA, and Paul W.S. Anderson, because each of them had one guild locked up for their names. so they both had to ditch the Paul Anderson name. Got it. So Anderson claims that they had an NC17 cut of the film,

but he toned down the gore to secure an R rating. Whatever, Constantine never would have released an NC17 version of the movie. In January, they hold a test screening. It's attended by In It Cool News founder Harry Knowles. And his criticism, I actually think, is a pretty good indication of what ends up happening with this movie. He says, quote, It's rare to find a scene that wasn't inspired by another movie. We're talking outright theft.

He called it a hybrid ripoff of Romero. He makes some pretty lewd comments about Jovovich and Rodriguez that I don't need to repeat here. But he also wrote, quote, despite being incredibly derivative, it works. As a fast-paced, action-packed zombie movie, it gets the job done, end quote. So the question is, is Resident Evil going to be the final nail in Paul W.S. Anderson's career? Or is he going to open up some new doors? So it premieres in Los Angeles on March 12th, 2002, releases wide on the 15th, and the reviews are bad. We went with some local reviews instead of national ones this time just to mix it up.

The Cincinnati Inquirer said, you'll be rooting for the flesh-eating zombies. That's true. This movie is so bad, it can't even steal effectively from other horror films. Nothing genuinely frightening or even surprising happens. The folks at the Kansas City star were a bit kinder. They gave it two stars. From Super Mario's to Laura Croft Tomb Raider, bad video game adaptations have been stinking up multiplexes for too long.

Resident Evil almost escapes this curse and has George Romero to thank for it. The Austin American Statesman wasn't high on. it, but did write that Jovovich has a decent action hero presence, and as a brooding commando, Michelle Rodriguez, is the only other remotely interesting cast member. The New York Times called it Microsoft meets the Night of the Living Dead, and Roger Ebert seemed dead set on burying it. He gave the movie one star. He wondered why Umbrella couldn't make a door that doesn't make a slamming noise when

it closes, and he put it on his worst films of the year list at the end of the year. Fans weren't high on this movie either, Lizzie. I think there was a general sense. of being bummed by the lack of adherence to the games, focusing on a new character created whole cloth, on action over, you know, horror, on style over substance. But something weird happened. Resident Evil opened number two on its opening weekend behind Ice Age.

It didn't make Tomb Raider money. It didn't even make Mortal Kombat money. But it did make Street Fighter money. And relative to Tomb Raider, Resident Evil was cheap to make. Right. It had a roughly $30 million budget. And how much did it make? A hundred million dollars.

Okay. So yeah, it's not a slam dunk, but it's profitable. It turned a profit. So even if you were to assume a $15 million advertising budget, which would be half the production budget, that would be $45 million. You'd need $90 to break even. It does $100. So it's profitable at the box office. And then you have to think DVD, home video, tie-ins to the video game.

Right. I think that they just released or they're about to release Resident Evil 3. They released the remaster of Resident Evil 1. this movie did pretty well. It found an audience. Well, and this is going to sound dumb, but I think one thing this movie does very, very well is the styling of Mila Yovovic. And that is super important. And obviously that's different from the game, but the outfit that they give her is so iconic and something they did that's very smart, which I don't know if this was intentional or not, but it's very repeatable for Halloween costumes. This is not a difficult or complicated.

costume to recreate. And I mean, it is a common costume I've seen over and over again. Lara Croft Tomb Raider is as well, but of course that's based on the game. But I do think that the way that they styled her was very smart. It's visually, immediately recognizable as this movie. I hadn't even seen this movie, and I knew exactly what she was wearing in it. So I do think that, like, that does something. That contributes to this.

Yeah, and I think there are a few fun set pieces that are decently memorable. The Laser Hallway, for example. Oh, when the guy gets cubed. loved it. Favorite part of the movie. Which is also like, it's such a rip-off of something like Cube, for example, but it's fun. Her doing the Trinity kick on the Doberman is also fun. The dogs are great. The dogs are great. It has its fun moments and its guilty pleasures, and it just kind of, you know, found its lane, weirdly enough, despite poor critical response, despite not really resonating with the fans too much.

And not all the fans disliked it, but again, it did not adhere to the games. And all of a sudden, this formula is, born. So a sequel was discussed publicly as early as February of 2002, which is before the movie was released. And Sony officially greenlit it in mid-2002. Again, I'm guessing seeing how successful 28 days later was as well, which was made even more cheaply, although it didn't make quite as much money at the box office. Anderson says, I'm not going to do a Mortal Kombat too. I'm going to continue to be involved in these movies. He can't direct the second one. He's committed to Alien versus Predator, but he's going to write it. So he stays on this writer. And all of a sudden, Miloovich has found her career.

So Resident Evil Apocalypse is released in 2004. It gets terrible reviews. It made $130 million against a $45 million budget. Resident Evil Extinction follows in 2007. $150 million against a $45 million budget. These movies, this is unheard of. They're going up. They are going up.

Paul W.S. Anderson returns for Resident Evil Afterlife. By the way, these all star Yovic. Of course. In 2010, Resident Evil Afterlife makes $300 million against its $60 million budget. Anderson runs it back. Resident Evil Retribution, 2012, $2,040 million against its $65 million budget. He brings it home. Resident Evil, the final chapter, 2016, $312 million against a $40 million budget.

What? Yovovic stars in every goddamn one. one of these, they bring in Ali Larder. Michelle Rodriguez returns for retribution. She plays clones of her original character. These movies get panned. Headshot, headshot. They will not die.

They keep coming back. There's only one of their franchise I could think of that's quite like it, and that's Underworld starring Kate Beckinsale. Those movies all do terribly. I like the first one, quite a bit. I like Underworld. I do, too. Underworld is better than this.

I'm sorry. Underworld is pretty great, yeah. Five stars. Five stars, no notes. Yes. Michael Sheen, Bill Nye, no complaints. Yeah. Kay, Beck and Sale, absolutely. Give me all of them.

Oh, that is such a Matrix. Rip off with the Waste A Dresser. It is amazing. Don't care. Love it. We'll cover it at some point because I do love Underworld. But here's the thing. Those films, there are five Underworld films, I believe, only made $539 million against a $207 million budget.

Even after an attempted 2021 reboot called Welcome to Raccoon City, which I'm not sure if you saw, but I actually thought was fine. That reboot flopped. Resident Evil as a franchise has still made $1.28 billion against a cumulative budget of $313 million. Holy shit. Yeah. Why? People love these weird, not really adaptations of Resident Evil.

All right. It's so interesting. It's the most successful B-movie franchise, C-movie franchise I can think of. You know, Jason Statham is kind of in this realm with his sort of annual... annual, you know, late August or January releases, Mutiny, you know, for example, just came out. I'm going to punch some people. Yeah. It's got to be Miliovovich, right? Like, I don't know. I just don't totally get it. I like her a lot. I find her very, very watchable.

I think she's great. She's very funny in Zoolander. She's very funny as Inca. What is it? Ketinka. Ketinka. Inka, Kibovagana. Yeah, something like that, yeah. Yeah, she's amazing. She's very funny. I think she is a really good actor. And she and Michelle Rodriguez do make this first movie watchable. Yeah. That's so crazy. That's crazy. I can't believe this has made that much money.

Yeah. Well, after kind of an on-again, off-again, engagement period, Paul W.S. Anderson and Miliovovich did get married, and they've continued to make a ton of movies together beyond Resident Evil. And honestly, God bless. If I could just go make movies that starred my pot spouse, I would totally do that. It's a lot of fun. I'm happy for both of them that they had this career turn.

And there was one other unexpected civil. to this movie. So because of the success of Resident Evil and then obviously 28 days later, and then Sean of the Dead, Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake, the development of the Walking Dead for AMC, zombies were revived once again. And because zombies were hot, George Romero suddenly had an opportunity and he didn't miss it. He landed a deal with Universal Pictures to make the fourth film in his Dead series Land of the Dead and was given a $15 to $20 million budget, which is far more money than he'd ever had before, more in the third. line with what he'd wanted to be able to do on Day of the Dead. And in fact, he was even able to do

certain scenes and sequences that he had been forced to omit from Day of the Dead in Land of the Dead and released in 2005, it actually received generally positive reviews. And despite its gore, grossed nearly $50 million at the box office and was profitable. And I, for one, saw it in theaters. And of course, this weekend, we look forward to the next reboot of Resident Evil. I actually am very excited. I am very excited. Written by Zach Crager and Shay Hatton, by Zach Kregor starring Austin Abrams. It is rumored, or Crager has posited, that this is the closest adaptation to the vibe of the original game

of being low on ammo and forced into corners. Yes. And not an action movie, but truly a horror movie. Only time will tell, but I'm very excited to see if after this many years and this much money, we get closer to the material than inspired these movies to begin with. Just based on the trailer, it looks a lot more like what you're describing in terms of the local.

The way that he's moving, the way that the creatures themselves seem to be moving. I am very excited. I read one thing where he said, you know, I just wanted to see what would happen if I put my foot on the gas at the beginning of the movie and don't let off until the end. And he at least seems to think that that was successful. So let's see how it goes. Well, Lizzie, that concludes our coverage of your favorite film of all time, Resident Evil. It's not my least favorite film. I know.

And I have to ask you, what went right? I think what went right here is Milo Jovovich. She doesn't get to do a ton in this, but I'm so glad that this became the lifeline for her that she needed at the time. It's obviously something that she has really enjoyed and thrown herself into. Like I said, I think she's a great actor. She has such screen presence and it's nice to see her play a role here that is in many ways so different from the one that she was playing in the fifth element where she feels very much like an object in that. And in this, even if she is not as active in this one as she becomes in later ones, it's so fun to see her, you know, when she does start to get some action sequences, it's very clear that she's very good at it. And so, yeah, I'll give it to her. I just think she looks incredible.

She's fun to watch. I love the way she moves. And I love Mila. More Mila. You know what? I'm just going to give mine to Michelle Rodriguez then because... She's so good. The two of them are the reason to watch these movies.

Yes. Or this one. It's weird that these movies are. are kind of the one, I mean, I'm just trying to think of any other female action franchise, you know, that we kind of had for that 20-year span from about 2000 to 2020. It really is this. It's really just these. And you know, what's interesting, too, is that, and I appreciate this very much.

You know, I talked quite a bit about her costume in this movie, but she's not overly sexualized, I don't think. No, that's the thing. It's just the costume. It's not the camera. Yeah. And even the costume itself is not, like, she's pretty well covered. I know I gave the asymmetrical dress some shit for like, you know, why would you be wearing that in the zombie apocalypse?

Because it was on the bed for you. It was on the bed for you. But also, it's not the most impractical thing you could be wearing. It actually does allow a decent... Not if you have to kick a dober one. Yeah, you can kick them. There's a good range of motion. That's why it's got an asymmetrical hem.

But I appreciate the way that they dress them. I appreciate the way that they continue to dress her over the rest of the franchise. Exception the weird hospital gown she's wearing at the end. Yes. I mean, you do see basically. her entire body in that. And yet, is it better than the fifth element? Yes.

Yes. Yeah, I don't think there is a leering quality to the way that Anderson shoots these scenes. He seems a little disinterested. I know, which is so funny. He wound up marrying her, yes. Which is very funny. He's like, yep, she's a supermodel. There's her boob and her entire body.

But also, let's go shoot some zombies. What are we doing, guys? Come on. All right, great. Well, we hope you guys enjoyed that deep dive into Residence. and evil in the game and the whole history before you go watch the new version this weekend. Lizzie, if folks are enjoying this podcast, can you let them know how they can support it? Of course, you can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to this on.

You can tell a friend or family member. Hey, what went wrong? They just covered Resident Evil. It's pretty good. It's pretty good episode. And then if you're like, you know what? I also want to go see the new Resident Evil. And I want to hear them talk about that.

You can do that. You just got to pay for it. that much, though, less than a movie ticket for $5 a month. You can now subscribe on Apple or Spotify or Patreon. And you get bonus episodes. We are doing at least two of these every month. Obviously, we are covering Resident Evil. This month, we also covered Practical Magic 2, which that was something. So, you know, make sure that you subscribe so you can go back and listen to that. And next month, it is October, which means we are launching our first ever box office book club where we are doing not one, not two, not three, but four bonus episodes for book to screen adaptations.

We're kicking it off with the adaptation of Colleen Hoover's Verity, which is just absolutely bat shit. Honestly, you know, it's got a dash of Resident Evil to it, a little bit of zombies around the house. Then we will be taking it to incidents around the house, which is, of course, the book that Other Mommy is based on, followed by Sense and Sensibility, and Finally, Wildwood. So please subscribe so you can join us for Box Office Book. Club, read the books, watch the movies, come and chat with us about all of it. And again, that is on Patreon if you would like to actually join us for the chats. And if you would like to listen to the episodes, those will be available on Patreon, Spotify, and Apple. And if you want to take it up one more

zombie notch, for $50 a month, you can get a special shout out just like one of these. I didn't make boogie nights. You may say I'm not a master. My style's an inherent vice, Art's not what I'm after. I'm the OG Paul Anderson and maybe I'm no savant I don't care about awards not one there's only one thing I want I want to film my wife fighting for her life go put on that little red dress the one I like best baby let's go make a mess but when I gave this scene to be Shell in the seams, baby, don't get mad at me. I'll make it up to you on a Resident Evil three or four or five.

You know we're gonna keep making these for a long time. Thank you so much to Mike and Clemmy Burbage, Anthony Thomas, Mandy Rarrelinson, Pete Ree Peterson, Team Lizzie, always primer, never primer, John D. Wiltshire, the cast and crew of Winnishra. to Browntown, Mark Bertha, Alex Barrett, Frankenstein, Angeline Renee Cook, Evan Downey, Amy Ogishlager McCoy, Johann George Gunnerson, Jory Hill Piper, Felicia G, Datum 3, Karina Kanaba, James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Shindleman, the Provost family, where the O's sound like

O's. Gaylin and Miguel, the Broken Glass Kids, David Friskillante, film it yourself, Kate Elrington, M. Zodia, C. Grace B, Blaze Ambrose, Rural Juror, Nate the Knife, Lena L.J., half-grayhound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Matthew Jacobson, J.J. Rapido, Lousy Susan, Sadie, Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Peng, Korea, Chris Leal, Brooke, Steve Winterbauer, Rosemary Southward, Jason Frankel, So Manchinani, Michael McGrath, and Lydia Howes. see Zach Gregor's new movie. Just remember who made it first. The OG Anderson with two female leads.

Thank you so much, guys, for sticking with us. You now all have the T-Virus. We are coming back next week with a movie that says, the scariest things in this world are high school girls. Lizzie, what do you have planned for us? I would argue the scariest things in this world are your mommy. Our mothers? Yes, yeah, there it is.

Yeah. We have Carrie. I'm so excited to talk about this movie, and of course. We're on a scary mommy stretch. We are on a scary mommy stretch. We're going to do other mommy. Verity. Definitely.

Keep an eye on your mommy. That's right. Come back next week for Carrie. I can't wait. Bye. Bye. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post production and music by David Bowman.

This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.