Monster Hunter isn't a video game series that's well known to the general public around here, but the first image makes the film adaptations influences quite clear. The first official look at the Monster Hunter movie is here and it includes two things you'd expect to see in any movie based on a video game, Milla Jovovich, and a big ass sword. Check it out.
The image is a pretty simple one in the grand scheme of things. It's Milla Jovovich, a veteran of the Resident Evil film franchise, and martial arts expert Tony Jaa running across the desert, or possibly a beach. The image wouldn't even be all that noteworthy except for the fact that Tony Jaa is carrying a sword as big as his head. If you had never heard of Monster Hunter before, you'd likely be able to tell that the new movie was based on a video game based on that alone.
While the Monster Hunter video game series is fairly popular in its native Japan and has no shortage of fans in the west, it's not exactly a mainstream game title. While your average filmgoer has likely heard of names like Mario, Zelda, or even the previous Milla Jovovich-led Resident Evil series, unless you play games, you may not know Monster Hunter at all.
At its core, the Monster Hunter game series is exactly what it says on the tin. A game in which players take the role of a character who is a professional hunter of monsters. These monsters can be killed or trapped. The games take place in a fantasy world where humans are regularly threatened by various creatures, and the player's job is to stop the monsters from doing damage.
Most of the games in the series have little more plot than that, though the most recent game in the franchise Monster Hunter: World has a bit more going on in the story department.
The movie will reportedly take a slightly different approach the basic material, as it will see characters from our modern world fall through a portal to an alternate dimension which appears to resemble the Monster Hunter world I just described. The modern humans will then have to become monster hunters in order to prevent the creatures from traveling back through the portal and attacking Earth.
Monster Hunter is being directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who spent the last several years bringing us the aforementioned Resident Evil movies alongside his wife Milla Jovovich. Those movies also took some significant liberties with the source material but frequently brought us some entertaining action movies if nothing else.
The Monster Hunter movie is currently without a release date but as one expects the film will require some significant post-production time in order to create all the various monsters that need to be hunted, don't expect to see this one before early 2020.
