Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil director Paul W.S. Anderson has settled on the next video game franchise he’ll turn into a wretched film. According to Deadline, Anderson is now in development on wringing a 20-30% Rotten Tomatoes score out of an adaptation of Monster Hunter, the game series Capcom kicked off in 2004.
It’s said Anderson has already written a script, and he’s shopping the project with a pitch that includes visual effects demos and concept art. One such piece of art is the above painting, which depicts a huge dragon just going to town fucking up LAX. It’s a scene that Monster Hunter players may find surprising, as Monster Hunter takes place entirely in a fantasy realm devoid of crowded international airports. Well, that’s going to be in the movie anyway, because Paul Certainly-Not-Thomas Anderson has a radically stupider take on what Monster Hunter‘s monster hunting is all about.
“The central characters are very relatable American characters,” the guy who made that Orlando Bloom Three Musketeers you already forgot about explained. “You take a person from the ordinary world who thinks they’re in a dead end job, they have no future, they feel like their life’s a failure, it’s going nowhere, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. It’s about a normal American who gets dragged into this parallel world, this Monster Hunter world. Then eventually the parallel world ends up coming to our world. So you have the creatures from the Monster Hunter world invading our world.”
The director of Pompeii—if you even remember that one—said he already has a sequel planned out to build a “cinematic universe.” (When you’ve been allowed to produce and/or direct six Resident Evil films, you start to just assume you’ll be crapping these out endlessly.) Tellingly, he also compared his vision of the films to “the best of Dune,” saying, “[The very relatable American characters are] fighting these giant creatures, some as big as a city block. They live underneath the Earth and when they burst out, it’s like the best of Dune.” Because of course Paul W.S. Anderson thinks the best of Dune is just the sandworm parts.
