[COLUMN] The Resident Evil Discourse Cycle Has Been Exhausting | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil releases in just under two weeks.

Nobody has seen it yet. Rather, nobody who has seen it yet can talk about it yet due to embargoes and non-disclosure agreements and so forth. Still, the movie has a frankly incredible pedigree. Cregger directed both Barbarian and Weapons, two of the best-reviewed horror movies of the past decade. While Barbarian went straight to streaming in most international markets, it still made $46m on a $4m budget.

Weapons, however, was a phenomenon. Weapons was apparently such a hot script around town that Jordan Peele fired his representatives at least in part for failing to secure the rights to it. The film grossed $270m worldwide on a budget of $38m. The film also went on to win Amy Madigan an Academy Award for her supporting turn as Aunt Gladys, a very rare example of award recognition for a horror movie like this.

So while the verdict is still out on Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, the film remains – on paper – an exceptionally promising adaptation of an existing intellectual property. Fans of Resident Evil could not possibly hope for a stronger pedigree of cinematic adaptation. There is a clear anticipation among general audiences for the film. Just last week, it was revealed that the film was tracking for a $35m opening, which would be the highest in the theatrical franchise. Other estimates have it over $40m.

It seems like these figures have made the production team somewhat bullish in the final push of press and marketing. “You don’t need to know anything about the games to enjoy this movie,” Cregger boasted in one recent interview, reaching out to broader audiences than the hardcore fandom. This has become something of the tone of the publicity campaign in this home stretch, with Cregger seeming a little exasperated with the hardcore fandom.

“I have never been approached by another franchise,” Cregger told Deadline about his franchise ambitions. “I’m doing this, and that’s it for me. So I’m not going to go tackle any other franchises — just because I’m a writer, and I want to write whatever I want to write. I don’t want to write something where I have to make sure I’m tagging different data points to satisfy X. I just want to satisfy me.” This is a very healthy attitude towards storytelling. It’s not a service industry.

There is a larger context for Cregger’s remarks. “I feel like I’ve been on somewhat of an apology tour. I feel like I’m running for office, trying to get these people not to call me a LARPer,” he told Playlist. “Now, I’m just like, ‘You know what? See the movie.’ If you still feel the same way after you’ve seen it, then whatever you think is fair. You’re going to decide if I’m an actual Resident Evil fan or a fake. What can I say? I think the movie is going to speak for itself.”

As is the way with most contemporary mass media adaptations of existing intellectual property, Cregger’s adaptation of Resident Evil has found itself under siege from certain vocal segments of online discourse positioning themselves as representative of “the fandom.” These groups have reacted loudly and aggressively to perceived changes to the source material, accusing Cregger of being less than suitably reverent to the Resident Evil video game franchise.

Cregger has talked about the surreal of this backlash, as a fan of the games himself. “I think I was naive,” he confessed to IGN. “I thought fans of these games, like me, would be thrilled that somebody was coming along and turning Resident Evil into a survival horror movie.” Cregger has spoken about his desire to recreated the sensation – the sense memory – of playing the games, rather than trying to produce a feature-length Wikipedia article.

Indeed, even watching the trailers, one can get a sense of Cregger trying to translate the feeling of playing the games into live action – the constant rummaging around in drawers desperately hoping for some useful piece of inventory or ammunition, the having to be very careful in the use of ammunition, the mounting sense of dread as something emerges from the darkness. It is clearly the work of somebody who loves the game. But that is seemingly not enough.

It’s worth acknowledging that this is not the only recent example of an adaptation of existing material that has met this sort of backlash. Damon Lindelof, Chris Mundy and Tom King’s Lanterns has been subject to the same sorts of criticisms and accusations for daring to make adaptational choices in bringing Green Lantern to screen, including from comic book writer Grant Morrison. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was subject to pre-release attacks for not looking enough like Troy.

Over the past decade, it has come to feel like an extremely vocal online minority wants nothing more than shot-for-shot recreations of things they already know translated from one medium to another. This culture produces things like the upcoming Harry Potter television series and the Disney “live action” remakes, and which has cultivated an appetite for generative artificial intelligence, which can just recycle existing material without being burdened by anything as gauche as a perspective.

So, for example, the HBO miniseries The Penguin is “embarrassed” of its comic book source material because it makes the adaptational choice to shorten the eponymous fowl feathered fiend’s surname from “Cobblepot” to just “Cobb” to reflect his more modest working class background in this adaptation. To quote a headline from CinemaBlend from 2013 that feels like this movement calcifying, “Iron Man 3 Ruined the Mandarin, and Real Fans Should Be Pissed.”

Honestly, it’s this weird and aggressive sense of entitlement that feels embarrassing. People talk about how these genres and these mediums are not “taken seriously”, but it’s largely because of attitudes like this. Over the decades, fans of various novels have understood that adaptation is a process and that changes – both cosmetic and fundamental – need to be made in translating a work from one medium to another. People take book adaptations seriously because they understand this.

Spielberg’s Jaws completely drops the tense domestic plot that is a large part of what Peter Benchley’s novel is about both narratively and thematically. Kubrick’s The Shining so fundamentally altered the character dynamics and perspective of the source novel that Stephen King has seemingly never forgiven him. Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park is a book about corporate espionage and conspiracy, miles away from Spielberg’s cinematic joy ride.

After all, spend any time talking to these people, and it immediately becomes clear that the underlying point is always just an attempt to disguise personal preference as an argument from authority. After all, particularly when adapting a medium as vast as comic books or video games, there is always something that can serve as a clear inspiration for an adaptation. Much of this discourse is rooted in creatives placing the emphasis somewhere other than where individuals want.

For example, most of the criticisms of Lanterns as a television show are anchored in an assumption that an adaptation of Green Lantern should look like writer Geoff Johns’ extended mythos re-defining run from 2004 onwards. The show is drawing much more overtly from the 1970 run, Hard Travelling Heroes, which is historically and culturally important to the history of the medium as a whole. The subtext of these criticisms is, “Why aren’t they adapting this material like I, me, personally, would?”

To be even more blunt in this assessment, many of these people don’t actually know what they want. “It's not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants,” observed comic book writer Alan Moore. “If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn't be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.” This is one reason why Moore is perhaps the best writer of western comic books.

There is, perhaps, a deep-seated insecurity in this. After all, the point of a shot-for-shot adaptation is somewhat undermined by the existence of the original material, material that has – in many cases – been perfectly tailored to its original medium. Frank Herbert’s Dune is a book that uses every advantage that prose has to tell its story, layering exposition and background and narration and glossaries to build a world. It only works because the audience is a reader, not a watcher.

Trying to translate that directly to film would misunderstand both mediums, so Denis Villeneuve has trusted himself to build a cinematic adaptation that is tailored to the strengths of film as a medium – visual storytelling, dynamic action, lean exposition, imagery, symbolism. Herbert’s Dune will always exist in its perfect form. And it has a companion in Villeneuve’s Dune, which will also always exist in its perfect form. Neither invalidates the other. In fact, they both enrich each other.

It can feel like this need in certain corners for film and television adaptations to be checklists of recognizable lore and minutiae reflects an anxiety about how the source material is perceived, that comics or video games need the validation of a direct one-for-one live action adaptation to be recognized as art. In reality, by their nature, the best comics and games exist in their perfect forms, and an overly literal adaptation into a medium with different strengths does them a disservice.

So, for example, Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen was doomed to failure because it is impossible to adapt something like “Fearful Symmetry” into live action. It is a comic book that only really works as a comic book, with the panel and page composition, and the ability of the reader to control the pace of their movement through it, doubling back. It can feel like so few people who claim to love these mediums actually understand them.

These same sort of fans sent death threats over the decision to kill Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, now widely regarded as the best Star Trek movie. They complained about the choices made by director Tim Burton on his two Batman movies to make them his own films rather than perfectly replicate the comics, only for that adaptation to become a huge source of nostalgia that could be cynically mined by The Flash a quarter of a century later.

And, sure, the obvious observation is that this is just the internet and these voices are just people who do not understand the basic mechanics of what they are talking about – in this case, the meaning of the word “adaptation.” This is the Dunning–Kruger effect, the tendency of people with the least knowledge to over-estimate how much they know, amplified by the social media echo chambers of the internet.

After all, the truth is that these arguments don’t matter in any meaningful sense. These voices positioning themselves as authorities are an insignificant minority. Lanterns is a massive critical hit and is a smash hit for HBO. The Odyssey is the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all-time and is looking to make $2bn. It is also a masterpiece. The Penguin received 24 Emmy nominations and won 6 of them. Iron Man 3 made $1.2bn. These voices are howling into the void.

The problem is that these voices, through the amplifying power of social media and echo chambers, do exert an influence on what gets made and how. It’s hard not to read Cregger’s acknowledgement that he is unlikely to do anything like Resident Evil again as a concession to that crowd, an admission of exhaustion to being subjected to that endless nonsense. Why would any filmmaker of Cregger’s stature and ability subject themselves to such sustained humiliation and harassment?

“At the point when work writing [and] directing big franchises has become the emotionally loaded equivalent of writing a new chapter of The Bible ([with] the probable danger of being stoned & called a blasphemer), then a lot of bolder minds [are] gonna leave these films [to] hacks [and] corp boards,” opined director James Mangold in July 2018, just months after his Logan – one of the best superhero movies ever made – became the first superhero movie to get a screenplay nomination at the Oscars.

Mangold’s prediction came to pass. There have been reports of studios using super fan focus groups to build their blockbusters. And, honestly? One can see it in the majority of the output from these brands. This feels like a large factor in why so many franchises aspire desperately to mediocrity. What talented storyteller with actual vision and ability would willingly tether themselves to and devote their energy to adapting a property where they will get this treatment for doing their job?

Cregger’s Resident Evil is one of the most exciting movies of the season. Nobody knows if it will be good, but it’s got more raw potential than most movies. It’s a big film from a talented filmmaker that radiates an obvious affection for his experience of the source material. As much as certain voices online might complain that Cregger is not treating the material with suitable “respect”, the truth is that he respects the material enough to give it his best effort rather than cynical nostalgic nonsense.

While it’s refreshing that the past week has seen Cregger and the marketing team feeling a little more emboldened in moving away from pandering to those voices, and one might hope that studios are learning the right lessons from the success of The Odyssey and Lanterns, it is a little depressing that the response from certain vocal segments online is that they would much rather have something like the recent Moana adaptation.