Milla Jovovich to star in Monster Hunter adaptation

Variety reports that Resident Evil star Milla Jovovich is reuniting with director (and husband) Paul W.S. Anderson and producer Jeremy Bolt on Constantin Film‘s Monster Hunter, which will begin production this September with an approximate $60 million budget.

Monster Hunter is an adaptation of the video game series that first debuted 10 years ago. The games are largely plotless and task players with simply hunting down monsters and customizing their own heroes. A while back, Anderson revealed the logline for the film, which reads as follows:

“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.”

He elaborated on how the game’s protagonist-free premise is helpful toward what they’re creating.

“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,” Anderson said. “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.”

Monster Hunter will shoot in and around Cape Town in South Africa. Constantin’s Martin Moszkowicz said at Cannes that the “crews are great there and, at least for a European company, it’s easy to get there: Same time zone, overnight flights. We are very much in a comfort zone of production.” Monster Hunter is the subject of a worldwide studio deal with Constantin planning to partner with a “big company” in Japan and another in China, both of whom will take equity in the project.

Special effects for the film will be supplied by Toronto’s Technicolor-owned Mr. X, which worked on the Resident Evil franchise, with CEO Dennis Berardi taking a producer credit on Monster Hunter. Moszkowicz says that the movie will be a highly stylish big screen adaptation of the video game.

Meanwhile, Constantin is also still working on their Resident Evil reboot, and Moszkowicz added that one option they are looking at is a TV series. “For us, the main thing is to get it right creatively so people don’t think it’s more of the same. That’s what it’s all about these days, a fresh, different approach,” he said. He also confirmed that Anderson will not return to direct.