Tales From Development Hell: George Romero's Resident Evil
- 3 hours ago
- 11 min read
By Ryan Fleming.
The zombie as it is understood in modern popular culture exists because of George A. Romero. Its ubiquity across popular culture owes a lot to video games of the 1990s, especially Resident Evil. The very first Resident Evil game was released in 1996 and quickly its potential for a film adaptation was recognised, with German company Constantin Film buying the rights in January of 1997; and as Resident Evil’s developer Capcom recognised the influence of Romero on their video game, it’s of little surprise that he was sought out to direct the first attempt to bring the video game to the big screen in the late 1990s.
Romero would not wind up directing the eventual Resident Evil film released in 2002, however. Those duties fell to Paul W. S. Anderson, who turned in a very different film from what Romero had planned.
The godfather of the zombie film ushering it into the 21st century makes for an enticing possibility. But would Romero’s adaptation of Resident Evil have been as successful as the version released in 2002?
The first writer brought on board for the film was Alan B. McElroy, whose screenwriting debut had been on the horror sequel Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). Even in its earliest drafts, the script began to deviate from the original video game. Although his version retained many of the original characters, it removed familiar elements like the STARS team or the villainous Umbrella Corporation. The basic plot outline of an armed team being sent into an isolated mansion which also houses a secret laboratory was retained and would remain a constant throughout all versions of the script up to the one filmed. The numerous non-zombie monsters that appeared in the video game were also still present in this first version of the script.
A version of McElroy’s script was leaked to PlayStation Magazine in June 1998, by which point the first sequel video game, Resident Evil 2, had also been released. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was also around the time McElroy’s script was ultimately rejected. One reason for this was that the release of the second game led to fears this script would seem dated. Another might have been the level of violence McElroy included in the script but considering whose hands the next script would fall into, this is perhaps false. No director had yet been attached to the project but the first of them was about to come from Capcom themselves.
George A. Romero’s first involvement with the Resident Evil franchise was, of all things, as the director of a live-action commercial for Resident Evil 2. That commercial, despite being filmed at Lincoln Heights Jail in Los Angeles and starring American actors Brad Renfro and Adrienne Frantz as Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield, only ever aired in the Japanese market. Its reception there was enough that Romero would be invited to write and direct the adaptation of the first game. Romero had never played the game himself, stating in a later interview that his experience of video games ended when he completed The Legend of Zelda in the late 1980s and decided to quit whilst he was ahead. Instead, he asked his secretary to play through the entire game and record it for him as reference material. We do not know if the secretary also recorded commentary and accidentally invented the Let’s Play as part of this research.
Even getting that far took some consideration, Romero even stating that he was not really interested in making another film with zombies. Indeed, the last film he had directed featuring his most famous creation was Day of the Dead (1985) over a decade prior, only writing the script for the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead (which was directed by makeup effects maestro Tom Savini).
He would soon relent and began work on a script adapting the first Resident Evil game. Its lean 96 pages contrasted with the 114-page version from McElroy, which took until page 70 to reach the infamous mansion whilst Romero’s script got there by page 30. Whilst Romero’s script bore a great resemblance to the source material it also took many liberties with it. Chris Redfield was retained as protagonist but went from being a member of the STARS team to being a Native American rancher living near Raccoon City. Other characters like Jill Valentine and Albert Wesker would appear in their more familiar roles, whilst Romero seemed to include some material from subsequent games with Ada Wong from Resident Evil 2 becoming a scientist in the Umbrella lab.
The first act as penned by Romero seemingly drew influence from his own film The Crazies (1973) with scenes of the military forcibly evacuating residents of Raccoon City. That this version of Redfield manages to avoid forceable removal by the military hints at the social commentary Romero had included in all his previous zombie films. There are perhaps more comparisons to be drawn with Day of the Dead, including scenes of zombies being sprayed with assault rifle file but still approaching some unfortunate character. James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) also shows an influence over the film as the cast is thinned out throughout in increasingly gruesome ways drawn from the various creatures, zombies and more, from the original game.
Artist Bernie Wrightson, co-creator of Swamp Thing, was hired by Romero to create the original design of the video game’s Tyrant monster from Romero’s description. Per Romero, he wrote five or six different versions of the script, which had the support of Capcom, but ultimately Constantin let him go from the project.
It was perhaps a head scratching decision, but not from Constantin’s perspective. This was the same company that had already produced an unreleased version of The Fantastic Four, executive produced by low-budget specialist Roger Corman, so that they could keep the rights from reverting to Marvel. What mattered to them was the bottom line.
Romero’s version would have been a great action horror film, but like McElroy’s the level of violence inherent in such a picture would have reduced its commercial viability as younger viewers would have been restricted from seeing it. At first, director Jamie Banks, fresh off the slasher film Urban Legend (1998), would be linked with a new version that would borrow more elements from Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999) in its adaptation. This version never made it very far and Paul W. S. Anderson was announced as writer-director before the end of 2000.
Amongst Anderson’s prior films was the science fiction horror Event Horizon (1997). The constant hiring of horror directors might seem counterintuitive for a company that wanted to veer away from outright horror for commercial reasons. However, also in Anderson’s filmography was Mortal Kombat (1995), one of the earliest commercially successful video game adaptations. It was also one that notably toned down the violence of its source material. Anderson had himself seen the film potential of Resident Evil after playing it, but upon discovering that the rights were already owned by Constantin he instead penned a script entitled Undead, which he himself called “a ripoff” of Resident Evil. Constantin head Bernd Eichinger, the same man that had ultimately rejected Romero, praised the ripoff which was developed into Anderson’s script for Resident Evil.
A leaked casting call gave fans a glimpse that none of the pre-existing characters from the video game would appear in the film. Anderson stated that part of the reason for creating original characters was wanting to keep fans into suspense as to whether or not the characters survive, rather than knowing that characters who survived into the video game sequel would automatically do so in the film version. Other tie-ins to the source material were also announced to be toned down by Anderson, citing these as being underperforming.
Aside from the characters, the film only really retained the basic structure of an armed response team infiltrating a laboratory hidden beneath an isolated mansion, where a contamination had resulted in the creation of zombies and some other creatures. The Umbrella Corporation plays a large role in the script, including creating the biggest addition from the source material: a malevolent AI that tries to lock down the laboratory and manages to dispatch most of the armed response team with laser beams. The tone of the film also went completely down the action route retaining only the veneer of horror. Most critics slated the film, whilst fans of the video games mostly rejected it for how it diverged from the source material. From Constantin’s perspective, their choices had paid off, literally. The film grossed a total of $103 million worldwide against a $33 million budget.
Anderson would go on to pen five sequels to the 2002 film between 2004 and 2017, also returning to the director’s chair for the final three in the series from 2010 onward. Film protagonist Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, who would marry Anderson in 2009, would feature in all six original films. Characters from the games would be introduced into the films starting with the second in the series, Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), but for many fans it was already too late. The series would be rebooted twice, first with Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), written and directed by Johannes Roberts, and then with simply Resident Evil (2026), co-written by Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten and directed by Cregger. A Netflix series, again simply titled Resident Evil not set in the same universe as any of the films, premiered in 2022 to negative reviews and was cancelled after airing eight episodes. Meanwhile, the video game franchise would itself go down more of an action route started with the acclaimed Resident Evil 4 (2005) before reverting to its survival horror origins starting from Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017).
George A. Romero meanwhile would eventually return to zombies with the fourth entry in his series, Land of the Dead (2004), whose $15 million budget was the highest in the series and allowed him to direct some sequences imagined for the lower-budget Day of the Dead. Its $46 million gross was the second highest in the series after Dawn of the Dead (1978). Until his death in 2017, Romero continued to develop new projects based on his most famous works. Two further films followed set in an alternate continuity: Diary of the Dead (2007) and Survival of the Dead (2019). Comics and a novel unfinished at Romero’s death would follow in the 2010s, as would a further film entitled Twilight of the Dead.
What would the state of both franchises have looked like if Romero had directed Resident Evil?
It is actually a difficult prospect, given what they had and then rejected because it wasn’t what they were looking for commercially. To make it more what they want means it soon is no longer the version of Resident Evil Romero was looking to make, and before long there’s a very different tale of development hell where an unhappy Romero has his script and then film torn to shreds by the production company.
Perhaps one way to square that circle is that whoever was sold on Romero’s vision for the film at either Capcom or Constantin takes up his case to Eichinger. Appeal to the same producer that made Christiane F. (1981) and Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989) of the social and satirical bent of Romero’s zombie films. This is likely wishful thinking, but it gets a version of Resident Evil from Romero’s script to market.
One thing we can probably say conclusively is that Romero’s Resident Evil, presumably released some time in 1999 or 2000, does not match the success of the Paul W. S. Anderson version released in 2002. It probably receives a small budget too but likely does manage to get a better reception from critics. Similar to Land of the Dead, it would show what Romero could do on a big budget and would showcase it in the subgenre he helped to create.
The one aspect that would definitely be better would be how the film is received by fans of the video games. Faithful enough to the source material and with a number of easter eggs, the script predicts the way such adaptations would be predictably made twenty years later. At the same time, it wouldn’t be long before casting choices like making Chris Redfield a Native American or supporting character Barry Burton an African-American would have segments of online fandom foaming at the mouth and amplified.
Would Romero’s Resident Evil have warranted a sequel? Even if it wasn’t as successful as Anderson’s version, a minor success on a property whose video game progenitors were still popular and already on their third instalment would at least get a look at further films. The main question is does the harmonious relationship between Constantin and Romero that we have conjured last into sequels? It probably does as far as pre-production but might not last into filming. Although his dismissal from Resident Evil was largely a one-sided fault on the part of the producers, in subsequent years Romero would develop something of a chip on a shoulder over all the works that cashed in on his films. That only increased into the 2000s when such works as the video game Dead Rising, set amidst a zombie apocalypse in a shopping mall, had to feature a disclaimer on its cover saying it was in no way licensed by Romero or the other makers of Dawn of the Dead. It was not a universally acrimonious attitude, with Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, the duo behind Shaun of the Dead (2004) getting cameos in Land of the Dead.
However, bumping heads with Constantin might lead to a split where Romero still goes off to make Land whilst the follow up to Resident Evil is handed to a different director, perhaps even Paul W. S. Anderson.
Another possibility is that Romero is kicked upstairs in the franchise, since Capcom never seemed to have any issues with him. The efforts that Romero put into video games, comics, and books for his own franchise might instead be directed towards Resident Evil, which would have better resources to actually see them through to development. We never see any follow up to Day of the Dead, but Romero’s fingerprints might be all over the wider Resident Evil franchise. Maybe the video games revert to survival horror quicker following Resident Evil 4 with Romero’s name attached, if that game even still goes down a largely action-driven route.
Regardless of what happens afterwards, there would exist by the end of 2000 a video game adaptation that has shown with a little bit of faith and a halfway decent writer and/or director you could have yourself a critically and commercially successful film released based on a video game, even on a lower budget. Audiences and fans alike might be spared House of the Dead (2003), Alone in the Dark (2004), Doom (2005), and Silent Hill (2006). Were it not for Bernd Eichinger, Uwe Boll’s directorial career might have been stopped before it even got started. It would not be a utopia, but there might have been a few more good video game to film adaptations in the 2000s and less outright awful ones.
Even for those of you who enjoy Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil as a guilty pleasure, like director James Cameron, you might rest assured that he might get his Undead script produced as a cash-in on Romero’s Resident Evil. It was mentioned this would not be a utopia.
For fans of horror films and the Resident Evil franchise in particular, George A. Romero’s Resident Evil represents a sort of holy grail of unmade films. There are very few combinations of filmmaker and franchise that pair together so perfectly. It’s one that could have represented a model for video game adaptations: since many video games that have film potential are themselves inspired by films, find a director of such pictures and offer them the job. Instead, the route that Resident Evil eventually took, adapting the source material in the broadest way with a director that comes far cheaper, became the model for more than a decade.
There’s nothing inherent in adapting video games to film that means they have to be of poor quality. There is something inherent in cashing in on something in the cheap that leads to poor quality films. They could have realised this a quarter century ago.
Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology.