Like it or not, Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film has been a critical hit. It reached universal acclaim on metacritic and was a smash hit among the PC Gamer team. I wasn't as fond of it as I hoped to be, but even still I loved the ride and appreciated its faithful adaptation of the videogames.
After all this time, I never thought a Resident Evil adaptation could be as good as this. Now, its success is mostly thanks to Zach Cregger's genuine admiration and great knowledge of the games, but some accolades also needs to go to Roy Lee, the film's producer and the person who secured the rights to Resident Evil after Cregger expressed interest in it.
Lee has also worked on other videogame adaptations such as A Minecraft Movie and (as reported by the Wall Street Journal) he currently has 20 movies and TV shows in development and production, which are based on games like Battlefield, God of War, and—my god: Silent Hill.
I am even less sure of someone being able to pull off a genuinely good Silent Hill adaptation than I was about Resident Evil, so I am morbidly intrigued to know more about this venture. But sadly that's all we know so far, there's no word on whether this will be a film or a TV series, so we'll just have to sit and wait for the fateful day when more is revealed.
But that won't stop fans from speculating or, more realistically, fearing what we now know to be the inevitable. The top comment on a Reddit thread discussing this adaptation simply reads: "For the love of James Sunderland keep Christophe Gans away from it!"
Yeah I get it—Gans' 2006 Silent Hill film adaptation leaves much to be desired. While I'll always defend the beautiful cinematography of Dan Lausten in this film, its writing and plot is convoluted and pretty confusing. Nostalgia has done that film a world of good for me, in so much that I look back on it kind of fondly now, appreciating the love that the people who worked on it clearly had for the games even if they didn't stick the landing.
Unfortunately, Return to Silent Hill is simply too bad and too recent for any kind of nostalgia to ease the pain. I'm not sure why Gans is completely opposed to staying true to the complex, vulnerable, and unlikable qualities of its male protagonists, but it's done nothing but hurt the adaptations. So I too will echo the above sentiment of: please, for the love of James Sunderland, do not let Christophe Gans anywhere near this upcoming project.
