After taking on Resident Evil for a lengthy series, Paul W.S. Anderson is taking on a new form of zombies in The House of the Dead. The movie is a take on the action-packed Sega franchise. He’ll be producing alongside his partner Jeremy Bolt, Sega’s Toru Nakahara and Story Kitchen’s Dmitri M. Johnson, Mike Goldberg, and Dan Jevons. Timothy I. Stevenson will be executive producer. The news comes from Deadline.
Anderson and Bolt have successfully brought video games to the big screen in Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, and Monster Hunter. The House of the Dead is a bit different because it comes from the arcade shooter that has players going through an already cinematic feeling game with light-guns. The zombies in the game were one of the first to show them actually running, which made for deadly foes for players. Here’s what Anderson had to say about the project.
“I’ve loved the video game since the nineties. Back then I was a big player of video games in arcades, which is how I happened upon Mortal Kombat.. And pretty much at the same time, I was also playing a lot of House of the Dead. It’s a title I’ve always loved. The IP has grown in strength, and now it’s really cross-generational. I was one of the original players, but now I have teenage kids who also play. That is the real attraction for me, that you’ve got a cross-generational piece of IP. We’re going to base the movie on House of the Dead three, and if you know the mythology that is all about family conflict, amidst the action and scares. It’s about a woman, Lisa Rogan, who’s attempting to rescue her father. And it’s also about Daniel Curien, who’s the son of the man who caused this mutant outbreak in the first place and who has to deal with the sins of the father.
My approach will be to reflect what this hyper-immersive, kinetic video game is, which is why Zack Snyder took these creatures and made them fast moving. This is a full-on terror ride. It’s different than what we did with Resident Evil, where there were lots of traps and puzzles and things to be figured out. House of the Dead is at heart a light rail shooter game, so it drags you straight into the middle of the action. I’m going to make a movie that mirrors that approach and plays out in real time, dragging the audience straight into the action. It’s not going to be kind of lumbered with a whole bunch of back story that might exclude people who know nothing about House of the Dead. Everyone’s going to be on the same page. Everyone’s going to get sucked straight into the action and learn about the characters and the plot, as they have 90 minutes to basically escape the most extreme haunted house you’ve ever been in.”
The movie should go into production by mid-to-late 2025.
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Source: Deadline
