Holden Furler
asked
Keith R.A. DeCandido:
I'm just wondering because it's been bugging me for years. Why is it that the fourth movie book in the Resident Evil series skipped and then Retribution written by John Shirley? I've purposely not read Retribution because of there not being An Afterlife novel. By the way your books were much more enjoyable than their movie counterparts.
Keith R.A. DeCandido
The answer to the first question is unknown -- movie companies don't always do novelizations, and for whatever reason, they never licensed out the rights to do a novel version of AFTERLIFE.
As for RETRIBUTION, that was done by a completely different publisher. The first three films were done when Simon & Schuster also had the rights to do novels based on the RE game, and so they had first shot at novelization rights. But the game license had lapsed by the time RETRIBUTION rolled around and so the novelization rights wound up, not with S&S, but with Titan. I was never at any point approached to write the novelization -- in fact, I didn't even know there was going to be one, or that John wrote it, until shortly before it came out -- so I can't speak to Titan's editors' thinking on the subject. Having said that, I can totally understand why they'd want to go with a different author than the one used by their competition. *wry grin*
I would have loved to have continued to work in the RE movie-verse, as I had a great time with the first three, especially EXTINCTION, which I'm inordinately proud of.
As for RETRIBUTION, that was done by a completely different publisher. The first three films were done when Simon & Schuster also had the rights to do novels based on the RE game, and so they had first shot at novelization rights. But the game license had lapsed by the time RETRIBUTION rolled around and so the novelization rights wound up, not with S&S, but with Titan. I was never at any point approached to write the novelization -- in fact, I didn't even know there was going to be one, or that John wrote it, until shortly before it came out -- so I can't speak to Titan's editors' thinking on the subject. Having said that, I can totally understand why they'd want to go with a different author than the one used by their competition. *wry grin*
I would have loved to have continued to work in the RE movie-verse, as I had a great time with the first three, especially EXTINCTION, which I'm inordinately proud of.
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