Degeneration

More side project than sequel, Capcom has announced via press release that it'll team with Sony to produce Resident Evil: Degeneration, a full-length computer-animated film.

It's not Sony's first foray into videogame-based animated features. In 2001, Square Pictures (a division of game studio Square, developing games for the Sony Playstation by this point) went all-out with Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a highly uncanny near-photorealistic sci-fi epic very tenuously connected to the unstoppable game franchise (fourth all-time total franchise sales, until Grand Theft Auto IV hits in the spring). The flick featured an impressive cast of voice actors (Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Peri Gilpin, Donald Sutherland, James Woods, Keith David) led by Ming-Na Wen, riding high on the success of ER, as Aki Ross, aggressively cross-promoted as part of a costly ad campaign. (Entertainment Weekly and Maxim weirdly treated her as a real actress, fig. 1.) Final Fantasy boasted what I recall as a fairly abstruse script, the absolute cutting edge of computer animation, and a box-office loss of somewhere over a hundred million dollars, effectively bankrupting Square Pictures, which was dissolved soon after.

Sony and Capcom don't seem cowed by the history. Resident Evil: Degeneration, which will likely eschew the theatrical release and 90% of Final Fantasy's ad budget, is due sometime next year. In defense of the idea, Square did re-venture cautiously into the CG feature field again in 2005, releasing Final Fantasy: Advent Children less disastrously to DVD with a more focused ad campaign and modest budget.