A new documentary will explore the story of George Romero’s cancelled Resident Evil movie.
The documentary has the straightforward title of George A. Romero’s Resident Evil: A Documentary. It is being written and directed by Brandon Salisbury, officially licensed by Capcom, and also coming this year.
While this documentary is new, hardcore Resident Evil fans will have heard of this story for a few years now. Some of them may have been following this story and its drama as it happened. We don’t think it will harm Salisbury’s documentary to recount this story seeing as he got to interview Romero’s personal assistant for it.
We’ll share a brief summary about this movie below. You can also easily find several YouTubes on the topic.
George Romero did have one completed project connected to Resident Evil. In 1998, he got to make a very short commercial for Resident Evil 2. This commercial was only broadcast in Japan, but it impressed the people at Sony Pictures.
Around this time, Romero’s career was somewhat on the downswing. He was executive producer for the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead, and even cameoed in The Silence of the Lambs. For the most part, however, he worked on lesser known, minor projects, and also some cancelled projects. A Dawn of the Dead remake was looming in 2004 to bring his name back to prominence, but that was a few years away.
Romero had a huge opportunity with this Resident Evil movie. He was still well known as the creator of the zombie genre, and Shinji Mikami was a personal huge fan.
Romero wrote a script draft within six weeks that basically retold the story of the first Resident Evil. Here comes the strange part.
Capcom rejects this script, that is faithful to the source material, and goes shopping for another director. They eventually settle on Paul WS Anderson, and history is made.
Why was Romero’s script rejected? As reported by Variety, Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto said “Romero’s script wasn’t good, so Romero was fired.”
It’s all very hard to believe, given that Romero seemingly did everything right up to that point. He had an assistant play the game for him so that he could follow the story of the game to the letter, and had added delightful setpieces of monster encounters, in the kind of horror film Romero would make.
Well, not all of Romero’s films are masterpieces, so there may have been good reason for that rejection. George A. Romero’s Resident Evil: A Documentary may actually answer those long lingering questions about what happened to this project, all those years ago. You can watch the official trailer below.
