While attending the Beijing International Film Festival, Pompeii director Paul W.S. Anderson let slip a few details for the upcoming Resident Evil sequel, Resident Evil 6.
It seems the next installment of the long-running video game movie franchise is committing two of modern cinema's most common sins: 1) Setting the film in China. 2) Sticking the word 'Rising' in the title.
That's right. According to the Tracking-board.com, Resident Evil 6 will officially be titled Resident Evil Rising, therefore becoming the most recent, in a long line of movies, to employ the over-used, generic and quite frankly lazy subtitle. Whereas usually the title makes a modicum of sense considering it's often reserved for prequels, here it's apparently in use for a standard sequel.
Anderson also suggested he'd like to film part of the movie in China, another trend that's occurring more and more in big budget action movies (take for example Transformers: Age of Extinction, Pacific Rim and Iron Man 3). The primary reason for this decision probably has to do with the economics behind the movie industry. Namely that to draw a bigger cut from Chinese ticket sales the movie must be a co-production with a Chinese studio. To qualify as a co-production, government rules state the movie must feature scenes in China, star Chinese actors and positively portray Chinese culture.
Anderson already has that second point down by confirming that Chinese superstar Bingbing Li will be reprising her role as Ada Wong.
Tracking-board also added the movie will involve Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her gang rushing to The Hive in order to prevent The Red Queen instigating a plan to wipe out humanity.
The name, although generic, was probably devised more to separate the movie from the game franchise which still titles its editions with numbers. While Resident Evil: Retribution certainly had a globetrotting storyline that could feasibly head to China.
Originally, the film was expected to begin filming last October, although that seems to have been delayed indefinitely since no filming had taken place yet. We were expecting a September 2014 release date, but I imagine we will not be seeing Resident Evil Rising until at least 2015 at the earliest.