Less than one year ago we were seeing trailers for the latest and supposed final Resident Evil movie. The sixth in the franchise, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter hit theaters just a handful of months ago. The franchise did not stay retired long.

Constantin Film is reportedly developing a reboot of the franchise. Who will star in the reboot, writer and director, and whether it will follow the same characters and stories has not yet been revealed.

Constantin owns the rights to Resident Evil, which is based on the video game series of the same name from Capcom, and they produced all of the previously released movies in the franchise.

Milla Jovovich led the first series of movies, playing the role of Alice. Her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson, directed four of the six movies, including The Final Chapter, and wrote all six of them. If they’ll be involved in the reboot at all is unknown at the moment. Anderson is currently working on another project based on a Capcom video game, Monster Hunter.

Love or hate the movies, the series has brought in over $1 billion at the global box office, so it’d be silly for Constantin to leave that asset sitting on a shelf for too long. The Final Chapter only made $26 million of its $40 million budget domestically, but it made a total of $312 million worldwide, believe it or not—nearly half of that coming from its run in China. That’s the biggest global total out of all six of the movies released so far.

There’s a lot of questions to be answered about this reboot—who will star and who will direct being at the top of the list, of course. But from where I sit the biggest question is what the approach will be. The Resident Evil movies never really did it for me personally, so I’m curious to see if Constantin, knowing it’s made them money at the box office, keep running with the action and effects-heavy style we’ve seen in the first six movies. Or will they, in hopes of finding an even larger audience and more success, take an entirely new approach to the movies with the reboot? Perhaps focus more on the horror this time around than the action?

Stay tuned.

[Source: Variety]

Follow me on Twitter.