Diego Boneta (Luis Miguel, Rock of Ages) has joined Milla Jovovich (Resident Evil franchise) in director Paul W.S. Anderson’s Monster Hunter movie for Constantin Films, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. Anderson also wrote the script and will be producing alongside Jeremy Bolt and Robert Kulzer.
The movie will also star Tony Jaa (Ong-bak franchise), Ron Perlman (Drive), and T.I. Harris (Ant-Man and The Wasp). The plot centers on the leader of a UN military team named Artemis, played by Jovovich, who is transported to another realm populated by monsters. There she meets the Hunter (Jaa), with the two teaming up to close a portal to prevent monsters from attacking earth.
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Boneta, who recently portrayed Latin icon Luis Miguel in the Netflix series Luis Miguel: La Serie, will play a member of Artemis’ team, a communications specialist.
Monster Hunter is an adaptation of the video game series that first debuted 10 years ago. The games are largely plotless and task players with simply hunting down monsters and customizing their own heroes. A while back, Anderson revealed the logline for the film, which reads as follows:
“For every Monster, there is a Hero. An ordinary man in a dead end job discovers that he is actually the descendant of an ancient hero. He must travel to a mystical world to train to become a Monster Hunter before the mythical creatures from that world destroy ours.”
He elaborated on how the game’s protagonist-free premise is helpful toward what they’re creating.
“There are no real central characters so it’s a bit like when we first approached Resident Evil and imposed our own characters and story on that world,” Anderson said. “I think this is a perfect IP for us to do exactly that same thing again. The Monster Hunter world includes these huge deserts that make the Gobi Desert look like a sandbox, and they have ships that sail through the sand. These full-on galleons, but rather than sailing on the ocean waves, they sail through waves of sand…You’re fighting these giant creatures, some as big as a city block. They live underneath the Earth and when they burst out, it’s like the best of Dune. You also have these flying dragons, giant spiders, the most wonderful creatures.”
Monster Hunter will shoot in and around Cape Town in South Africa. Special effects for the film will be supplied by Toronto’s Technicolor-owned Mr. X, which worked on the Resident Evil franchise, with CEO Dennis Berardi taking a producer credit on Monster Hunter. The movie will be a highly stylish big screen adaptation of the video game.
(Photo Credit: Getty Images)
