Resident Evil is the most successful film franchise based off a video game. While the movies have never been critically well received (the highest they ever reached on Rotten Tomatoes was 35% for this year’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter), the six-film franchise has raked in $1.2 billion to date. With interest in the video game series alive and well (last year’s Resident Evil VII: Biohazard scored an 86 on Metacritic), it only stands to reason that we’re not really done with the movies either.

According to Variety, Martin Moszkowicz, chairman of the board at Constantin Film, which produced all of the Resident Evil movies, says that a reboot is underway, although there are no details on how it would tie into the previous franchise, assuming it connects at all. Variety also reports that the plan is for the new reboot to span six movies. There’s no word yet if Paul W.S. Anderson, who wrote all of the Resident Evil movies and directed four of them, would return for the upcoming reboot, especially since he’s busy adapting the video game series Monster Hunter for a late 2017/early 2018 release.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind the Resident Evil franchise getting a reboot if they tried to do it as straight horror. The movies started out trying to straddle the line as sci-fi/action/horror hybrid before eventually deciding that the series would just work best if it was a series of action movies starring Milla Jovovich, which is fine. But Resident Evil began as essentially a haunted house story and played up the survival horror element where you were always low on ammo and healing herbs with a monster possibly around every corner.

However, with a six-film franchise planned, I fear that they’ll just keep hammering the action route, especially since from a financial perspective it’s worked so well for them to make Resident Evil into a series of action movies rather than try to play up the horror angle.

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