Director Paul W.S. Anderson Is Adapting Capcom's MONSTER HUNTER
Back in 2011, Capcom producer Ryozo Tsujimoto announced that there was a big screen adaptation in the works for their video game franchise Monster Hunter. Director Paul W.S. Anderson has been interested in developing this property for years, and now it looks like he's going to make it!
Anderson directed the original Mortal Kombat film and the Resident Evil film franchise. This seems like the kind of film that he would want to make.
In case you're not familiar, Monster Hunter is a series of fantasy-themed action role-playing games that all started in 2004 on the PlayStation 2. The game centers on a hunter in a fantasy world who embarks on quests to hunt out specific kinds of monsters to kill or capture them. When talking about the basic plot of the film, Anderson said:
“For every Monster, there is a Hero. An ordinary man in a dead end job discovers that he is actually the descendant of an ancient hero. He must travel to a mystical world to train to become a Monster Hunter, before the mythical creatures from that world destroy ours.”
When talking to Deadline, he went on to elaborate on his plan for adapting the ambitious game series, which has no main characters to base the film on. He explained:
“There are no real central characters so it’s a bit like when we first approached Resident Evil and imposed our own characters and story on that world. I think this is a perfect IP for us to do exactly that same thing again. The Monster Hunter world includes these huge deserts that make the Gobi Desert look like a sandbox, and they have ships that sail through the sand. These full on galleons, but rather than sailing on the ocean waves, they sail through waves of sand… You’re 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. You also have these flying dragons, giant spiders, the most wonderful creatures.”
Anderson said that he plans on making a change from the video game to the film. The movie will take place in both the real world and the Monster Hunter world. He said:
“The final act comes back to our world and it’s basically this epic battle in and around LAX. Then at the end we’re suddenly confronted with the fact that the mythological creatures of our world have come back to wreak vengeance. So we definitely have the second film where that would be planned out.”
It sounds like he wants to make a completely epic film. This would easily be the biggest and craziest film that Anderson has made. Anderson is the kind of director that makes big budget B-style movies. Many of them have turned out to be really fun and entertaining, but a movie like this would have to be on another level, and I'm just not sure he has got the storytelling chops to make it great.
The director released a piece of concept art that you can see above featuring the LAX battle that he's talking about. Anderson has already written the script for Monster Hunter, and it looks like it will be the next film that he directs.