'Resident Evil' Reboot: '47 Meters Down' Director Johannes Roberts To Helm Project

The previous “Resident Evil” film franchise was a huge success, so now a reboot of the video game adaptation is on its way, with Johannes Roberts taking the helm.

Constatine Film has hired Roberts to write and direct the “Resident Evil” reboot, Variety exclusively revealed on Wednesday. Roberts is mostly known for directing the shark movie “47 Meters Down,” which was released last year. He also helmed the 2018 thriller “The Strangers: Prey at Night,” the sequel to 2008’s “The Strangers.”

Constatin Film first announced its plans for a “Resident Evil” reboot in May 2017. At the time, it was reported that the reboot will be the beginning of a new franchise that will span up to six films.

The film production company sees the reboot as “a high priority” since the previous six “Resident Evil” films were successful and raked in $1 billion at the box office, according to GameSpot.

The previous films all starred Milla Jovovich and were produced by her husband, Paul W.S. Anderson. Anderson also directed four of the films. Jovovich and Anderson are currently working together on the film adaptation of the "Monster Hunter" video game.

The “Resident Evil” movie reboot will be produced by James Wan, who is known for his horror movies “Insidious” and “The Conjuring.” Wan is also the director of Warner Bros. and DC Film’s upcoming “Aquaman” movie, which is scheduled to be released next week.

Constatin Films has also hired Greg Russo to pen the script for the upcoming reboot. No plot details have been revealed for the new movie, but Russo did say that the latest entry in the game franchise, “Resident Evil 7,” was a huge inspiration in writing his initial draft of the script.

“Obviously I’m a huge fan of the franchise so to work on that was a lot of fun,” Russo told Discussing Film in an interview last month. “And they’ve made six films before so when you come back to that and reboot it, you wanna do something different and not just rehash.”

“For me it was very clear cut that I wanted to go back and make it scary again like a horror film in terms of the classic James Wan style so that was the pitch, going back and looking what made the games scary in the first place so yeah ‘Resident Evil 7’ was a bit of a touchstone for my draft,” Russo added.

The “Resident Evil” movie reboot doesn’t have a release date yet, but production is set to begin sometime in 2019.

Meanwhile, Capcom is preparing a remake of “Resident Evil 2,” which will be released on Jan. 25. The video game developer recently released new gameplay footage showing off characters Ada Wong and Claire Redfield.