The husband and wife duo of Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich make no bones about the types of movies they love to collaborate on, all of which fit a very similar template. They’re broad, effects-driven action adventures that never seem to find much love from critics, but can typically be relied on to do decent business at the box office.
The approach worked extremely well for the Resident Evil franchise, which became the highest-grossing series of video game movies ever, while The Three Musketeers also managed to turn a profit. However, the winning streak came to an end with Monster Hunter, which bombed at the box office due to a combination of the Coronavirus pandemic and a bout of controversy that saw it pulled from the potentially lucrative Chinese market.
The console-to-screen translation is exactly what you’d expect it to be given both the title and the talent involved, forcing Jovovich to journey between dimensions to stop terrifying creatures from destroying humanity on either side of the portal. Unfortunately, though, most of the headlines surrounding Monster Hunter concerned a joke in the script that was interpreted as a racial slur by Chinese audiences, causing it to get yanked from the theatrical schedule and blasted online, before all of the key creatives came forward to apologize.
That being said, the pic has been performing very, very well on streaming since being released on VOD, and it’s currently one of the most popular movies on Amazon. Whether or not it brings in big enough numbers to justify a sequel is another question entirely, but Jovovich and Anderson have already got their next project lined up regardless of what happens.