The very first trailer for Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is here, and its writer-director Johannes Roberts has sat down exclusively with IGN to break down all its Easter eggs and callbacks to the original Capcom games.
The Screen Gems film is based on the first two Resident Evil games and it chronicles how Raccoon City went from being a city of industry to a dying Midwestern town that’s become ground zero for the t-Virus outbreak. Think of it then less as a reboot or a remake of the film franchise but as the origin story of the Capcom games.
Welcome to Raccoon City features such iconic games characters as Claire Redfield, Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Leon S. Kennedy, Albert Wesker, Chief Irons, Lisa Trevor, William Birkin, and more characters gamers will recognize.
Kaya Scodelario (The Maze Runner, Crawl) plays Claire, who Roberts says “arrives in Raccoon City looking for her brother, Chris. She grew up in Raccoon City in the orphanage with her brother and ran away when she was just a child and she's now back.”
Roberts calls Claire “a very haunted soul who ran away from Raccoon City when she was very young because she felt she saw some things” and adds that Claire “feels it's an evil place where there are some nefarious things going on. And she has spent the last few years reinforcing her knowledge of Umbrella.”
But while the Redfields are key protagonists here, the filmmaker says his movie is “very heavily based around Leon Kennedy's first day on his job,” drawing inspiration from Resident Evil 2 (the original game not the remake). “I really wanted to go back to nerdy, geeky Leon Kennedy,” says Roberts. Leon S. Kennedy is played here by Avan Jogia. This means that yes, there will be a secene where Kennnedy wakes up hungover after being dumped by his girlfriend.
The chief reason for Roberts embracing the original two Resident Evil movies as the template for Welcome to Raccoon City was to bring the horror back to the film franchise. “It was really important to me in this movie to scare people and to create a dark, creepy atmosphere that I felt that maybe had been missing from the previous movies, which were much more action,” says Roberts, who cites 1970s genre films such as The Exorcist and the zombie films of George A. Romero, and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 as influences.
Check out our full breakdown video for every Easter Egg in the trailer, including references to Code Veronica. For more on Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, check out these new official photos as well as our long-form interview with filmmaker Johannes Roberts.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City opens only in theaters on November 24, 2021, in the US, December 3 in the UK, and December 9 in Australia. The cast includes Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia, Donal Logue, and Neal McDonough.