10 Movie Franchises That Need To Return To Their Roots

The Resident Evil franchise is one of those mid-budget film series which operates largely on the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Beginning in 2002 with Resident Evil, it's become a reliably predictable affair, structured in an episodic manner which leaves audiences knowing exactly what they are going to get.

Which is fine if you're a hardcore fan of star Milla Jovovich - each installment delivers plenty of prerequisite action sequences in which she spins through the air in slow motion taking out the undead - but for everyone else it wore thin quickly, relegated to the kind of film franchise only slightly above straight-to-DVD fare.

With 2017's The Final Chapter wrapping up Jovovich and director Paul W S Anderson's run at the franchise and a reboot already in the pipeline, a great opportunity to capture the spirit of the original video game is on the horizon. From the outset of the existing franchise Anderson and his collaborators made little use of the original game's "haunted house" vibes, preferring to jump almost immediately into the realm of high tech secretive laboratories.

Anderson's franchise was certainly action heavy, with hit and miss set pieces; in the hands of a more measured and restrained director such as It Follows' David Robert Mitchell, there's a unique opportunity to reboot the franchise with an emphasis on spooky atmosphere and chilling horror, precisely what made the original game's creepy old mansion so edge-of-your-seat intense and frightening.