The fantasy game series Monster Hunter is getting a movie adaptation this December, and a new trailer has just been released. The Monster Hunter titles are all very straightforward action role-playing games and have been well-loved since the first game released on the Playstation 2 in 2004.
This Monster Hunter movie has been in development since 2012 but only began production in 2018. The film was initially scheduled to release in September of this year, but the coronavirus outbreak caused Sony to push back the release date to April 2021. It wasn’t until recently that the studio decided to move the release of Monster Hunter forward again to December 2020. The movie will now supposedly release only in theaters, something that very few movies have chosen to do in the wake of the pandemic.
This new release date was included in the new trailer for Monster Hunter, posted to the official Sony Pictures Entertainment YouTube channel. The new footage expands on a previous trailer that revealed a quick glimpse at the Diablos monsters. The new trailer also provides new insight into the story. In this trailer, a magical sandstorm transports Captain Artemis, played by Milla Jovovich, and her military team to the Monster Hunter games’ fantasy world. There, they meet a Hunter, played by Tony Jaa, and have to fight against the many dangerous monsters they come across. You can view the whole trailer below.
The most significant difference between this Monster Hunter movie and the video games is that it centers the military characters from the real world rather than the Hunter, who is usually the player character in the video games. The military connections may face backlash from some who had heavily criticized the U.S. Military for using gaming spaces like Twitch to recruit minors as young as 13 years old.
It is highly unlikely that the upcoming Monster Hunter movie is a recruitment tool in the same way the Twitch streams have been. Still, it’s undeniable that perceptions of the military heavily influenced the creation of the film. The movie could subvert audience expectations by using its script to criticize the U.S. military’s power in the same way the Avengers franchise did. However, the trailer seems too straightforward for that. Monster Hunter will most likely be a simple action story that uses the military as an aesthetic backdrop and nothing more.
Key Release Dates
Monster Hunter
Release Date:2020-12-18
