Resident Evil fans are having a very good week. On the heels of Capcom’s January 24 release of Resident Evil 7 across all platforms, including PlayStation VR, comes Sony Pictures’ film Resident Evil: The Final Chapter on January 27.
Milla Jovovich’s sixth time playing the role of Alice, an original character created by director/writer/producer Paul Anderson, will be her final one. The film franchise, which is set in Capcom’s video game universe but tells an original story, is the most successful video game movie series of all time, generating more than $947 million at the global box office.
“So you’re actually going to see the newest creatures from the game in the movie, which is really cool.”
“Resident Evil 7, the game, is coming out this month, so we were really lucky because we got a chance to look through all of their newest monsters and see what the new inspirations are for the game,” Jovovich told Digital Trends. “So you’re actually going to see the newest creatures from the game in the movie, which is really cool.”
Anderson has kept gamers engaged with the films over the years by incorporating characters from the Capcom series like Claire Redfield (played by Ali Larter once again) into the film franchise’s original storyline.
“At first it was a little bit intimidating because people that play the Resident Evil video game are so loyal, but we try to keep it really close to the vest, meaning I dye my hair red, I put on the red leather jacket and I have a lot of the same weapons that she has in the game,” Larter told Digital Trends. “In the fourth film (Apocalypse) I fought the Axe Man from the game, so it really is a wink to the people that play the games to see what similarities we bring to each movie.”
Jovovich believes the time is right for her to retire her video game guns after six films.
“It’s so crazy after 15 years to finally say goodbye to Alice,” Jovovich said. “I have to say that she inspires me. I feel like when I’m stressed, when I’m frustrated, I channel my inner Alice, so to think that I’m not going to be able to go back to this crazy universe where we’ve been living for 15 years is wild. I’m going to miss the people and I’m going to miss the sets. I’m going to miss the zombies. I love them.”
Sony Pictures is making sure the franchise goes out with a bang. The studio has released a virtual reality experience through effects house Mr. X (which also does the visual effects in the films) called The Killing Floor, which takes cues from the first and sixth films and puts users in the heart of The Hive.
Sony has also unleashed the Red Queen from the new film on Facebook as a messenger app from artificial intelligence agency IV.AI. The virtual queen challenges fans in Resident Evil trivia using automated AI with built-in natural language processing, making the experience eerily close to interacting with a real person.
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter hits theaters nationwide on Friday, January 27.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?