The British B movie king who makes billions – and enrages the critics

Telegraph

18-03-2025

In 2019, B movie director Paul WS Anderson returned to the heart of darkness. Or, to give it its present-day name, the Great British Bake Off set. Anderson, whose work is as loathed by critics as it is popular with audiences, was at Pinewood Studios, outside London, where his daughter, Ever, was playing the younger version of Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow in the Marvel caper of the same name. For old-time's sake, he and his wife (and regular collaborator) Milla Jovovich, swung by the studio backlot.
At that point, it was at the nexus of British cosy telly as the home of the Bake Off tent. In the mid-1990s, however, it was where Anderson filmed one of his rare critical hits, Event Horizon.
'I used it for abject horror, and now it's used for a baking show,' he would tell Vulture. 'We watched them shoot, because we're big fans of the show and we liked seeing Paul Hollywood and all those people. Someone comes running over to us. Turned out the director had recognised us, and they were desperate to invite Milla to be on the celebrity edition.'
If there is a Paul Hollywood of over-baked, calorific, yet reliably more-ish B movies, it is Anderson. Nobody seems to much like what he does, but he continues to defy film-making gravity and clock up success after success. This weekend, he's back upsetting reviewers once again with his George RR Martin collaboration, In the Lost Lands.
Adapted from an obscure 1982 Martin short story recommended to Anderson by Jovovich, In the Lost Lands is the director's love letter to old-school sword and sorcery. With an art style inspired by the brawn-and-chain-mail bikinis style of artist Frank Frazetta, it stars Jovovich (of course) and wrestler-turned-Marvel-regular Dave Bautista as a witch and a warrior travelling through a cursed kingdom.
There's lots of swordplay, though, as is the tradition with Anderson, the one foe he cannot defeat is the critic. 'A threadbare film that barely resembles an idea,' said the New York Times. 'An agonising slog,' agrees Detroit News.
Critical pans are old hat for Anderson. His low-budget 1994 debut Shopping – starring a baby-faced Jude Law and future wife Sadie Frost – was condemned as an 'orgy of destruction', a line Anderson turned into a marketing slogan. 'That was supposed to be a criticism and I loved it so much that we stuck it on the poster.'
Shopping was a British indie flick financed by Channel 4 – an experiment which, according to Anderson, encouraged the broadcaster to go on to fund Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. Yet as Boyle became the toast of cineastes, a different fate awaited Anderson.
He moved to Hollywood, where his over-the-top directing found a more receptive audience, and since then, he's barely slowed down – guided by the philosophy that, in his line of work, commerce must always trump art. 'The film business is a business, and there's a relationship between how much you spend and how much a movie has to make.'
His 15 theatrical movies up to In the Lost Lands have a combined box office of more than $2 billion, and he has a reputation for always bringing in his projects under budget and on time. He's a decent boss too, having a policy of not forcing his VFX teams to pull all-nighters to meet a deadline ('after a 10-hour work day, people start slowing down, and you're not getting the best out of them').
However, Anderson's major contribution to the advancement of humanity is undoubtedly his six Resident Evil outings – blockbusters that have mopped up financially without anyone really paying attention.
The highest earning, 2010's Resident Evil: Afterlife brought in a whomping $300 million on a budget of just $60 million. All told, Resident Evil and sequels are the most successful horror movie series ever. They also confirm Anderson as a true Hollywood unicorn: a director who almost always makes money.
'His work in the Resident Evil franchise is where he stands out to me. As a director he was able to bring a complex video game story to life in a way that was well received by fans of the game, but accessible to people who had never played it,' says Nic Brown, author, filmmaker and host of the B movie podcast. 'He definitely has a 'type' when it comes to film – sci-fi action with monsters – and he knows how to get the most bang for his buck with that type of film. He also has an eye for what looks good on camera.'
Despite what the critics might tell you, he's even turned out the occasional worthwhile release. With 2004's Alien vs. Predator he revitalised two flagging franchises with one of the first crossover events in cinema, but his masterpiece is surely Event Horizon. The space horror he shot on the future Bake Off set was blatantly derivative of Ridley Scott's Alien. Yet, it delivered chills by the bucketful and had a great cast, including a post-Jurassic Park Sam Neill and a pre-Matrix Laurence Fishburne.
Dismissed as sci-fi tosh at the time, it has since been rehabilitated. A 2021 BFI essay praising Anderson heralded it as 'a haunted-house-in-space picture that finds a gateway to hell on the other side of a black hole'.
He has also won a cult audience for 1998's dystopian Soldier, in which Kurt Russell played an ageing warrior put out to pasture by a sinister mega-corporation. 'Soldier finds him at his most stripped-back and economical,' said the BFI. 'The dialogue-free opening sequence that introduces Kurt Russell's obsolete military assassin might just be his best.'
It is the Resident Evils that – for all their lucrative qualities – divide opinion. In a radical departure, reviewers have tended to be kind towards them – but they are loathed by devotees of the Resident Evil video games, who point out that Anderson's work bear almost no resemblance to the PlayStation source material. Sony would seem to agree. It has just green-lit a reboot of the zombie saga, to be directed by Zach Cregger (best known for horror flick Barbarian), which will 'harken back to the original Capcom game's horror roots'.
That will please the Resident Evil community, which is generally of the opinion that Anderson hijacked the series to give his wife steady employment (Jovovich plays Alice – the hero of the movies but a minor character in the games).
'He is just. Awful. Awwwwwful. Every time he announces a new movie I feel terrible,' wrote one Resident Evil fan on Reddit. 'It is just unfathomable how he has been allowed to continue making such bad adaptations and staining not only existing material but killing all hopes of ever receiving proper adaptations in the future. '
Anderson would never claim to be a Scorsese-esque titan of the screen. Yet he does see himself as a proper filmmaker. He cites John Boorman as an influence and names Walter Hill's 1978 minimalist thriller The Driver as a key cinematic text.
He has also spoken about how he was inspired by the post-industrial landscapes of his native Newcastle. Born in 1965, he came of age in the 1970s and 1980s, when the Northwest was in the throes of industrial decline. Memories of shuttered coal mines and rusted ship-yards have contributed to his gloomy style – from the urban grit Shopping to the grimdark wastes of In the Lost Lands.
'I grew up in the north of England, which was a fairly bleak post-industrial landscape. When I was growing up, there was a lot of dereliction. It was a big heavy industrial part of England: iron and steel, coal mining, ship building,' he said in a recent interview. 'But when I was a kid, all of that industry and infrastructure had fallen apart. I'm also from a family of coal miners, so that partly explains my fascination with underground spaces and tunnels, and these malevolent environments.'
Everything about Anderson's career is super-sized. His first hit, 1995's Mortal Kombat, earned $122 million on a $20 million budget. Conversely, his most earth-shattering flop, 2014's Pompeii – starring Kit Harington at peak Game of Thrones fame – burned through $100 million only to go up in smoke. He even instigated a crisis with China when a line improvised by an American-Asian actor on the set of 2020's Monster Hunter went down badly in the world's biggest film market and provoked an international incident that resulted in the project being essentially banned.
'Some people drew a relationship between [the] line of dialogue and an old school yard rhyme that dates to the Second World War and was used to taunt Chinese children. I was totally unaware of this, and so was the actor who improvised the line,' he told Vulture. 'And, by the way, the movie went through the Chinese distributor and the Chinese censorship board, and no one there picked up on it either. But then it became a big thing.'
It's hard to imagine any such backlash attending In the Lost Lands – though George RR Martin fans may be disgruntled at seeing their favourite fantasy author co-opted into the Anderson circus. Either way, don't expect the director to be much bothered. An unstoppable box office force, he ploughs on whatever the critics say. In fact, his ability to keep moving forward even as the brick-bats come flying at his head might be his greatest talent.