We’re not going to have to wait much longer for that Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City trailer. Online, Sony Pictures released a brief teaser that’s edited to look like it’s come straight from the Umbrella Corporation. Fortunately, it’s just to let us know that the movie’s official trailer will arrive on Thursday, Oct. 7, rather than to announced that the T-Virus has just leaked. You can watch the teaser below.
🚨 24 hours until we get to Raccoon City… 🧟♂️🧟♀️@ResidentEvil: #WelcomeToRaccoonCity exclusively in movie theaters November 24. pic.twitter.com/SpL8ZQUTVL
— Sony Pictures (@SonyPictures) October 6, 2021
Johannes Roberts wrote and directed Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Its cast, made up of characters from the first two video games in the series, is comprised of Kaya Scodelario as Claire Redfield, Hannah John-Kamen as Jill Valentine, Robbie Amell as Chris Redfield, Tom Hopper as Albert Wesker, Avan Jogia as Leon S. Kennedy, Donal Logue as Chief Brian Irons, Lily Gao as Ada Wong, Neal McDonough as William Birkin, and Chad Rook as Richard Aiken.
Previously, director Paul W.S. Anderson developed a series of Resident Evil movies with Milla Jovovich starring as original character Alice. The movies drew mixed reactions from diehard fans, criticized by some for the creative liberties taken with the story, but they were undoubtedly very successful, bringing in huge profits for Sony with every release. That movie series has since concluded with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, which was the sixth installment and released in 2016.
Of introducing a new character as the protagonist in his movies, Anderson previously said at New York Comic-Con, “If you look at the game, while the Alice character is not in the game, the archetype certainly is. There’s a lot of very strong female characters that you get to play as in the game. By having a completely fresh character and telling a prequel story to the world of the video games, it gave us some more dramatic license that we wouldn’t have had if we’d done just a straight adaptation of any one of the games, where gamers would come to the movie knowing exactly what the mystery beats would be, who was going to die when.”
Paul W.S. Anderson sounds reasonable enough with this explanation, though there were still many gamers who would have preferred a movie more faithful to the video games. Johannes Roberts seems to have gotten that memo, as the cast of characters are all people we first met in the video game series. Making the Spencer Mansion the central location is another hook that has many fans pleased. As it stands, however, there were still others who cried foul because some characters don’t look exactly as they do in the games.
“It was hugely important with the whole casting process to find people who embodied the spirit and energy of the characters I wanted to portray,” Roberts told IGN of the casting process. “I think often in game adaptations one of the big flaws can be just casting someone to look visually like the characters – giving them the identical haircut and clothes but not really trying to give the audience the thing that a movie does better than a game – which is to create a three-dimensional character that you can really connect with and believe in. I think as I said before one of the traps of falling into game adaptations is to make it feel like a giant cosplay version of the game.”
In any case, we’ll all get a much better look at what’s to come in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City when the trailer is released on Thursday. The movie is set to be released exclusively in theaters on Nov. 24, 2021.