Almost a decade ago, a divisive video game franchise came to an end after six movies and a total box office haul of $1.2 billion. Yet despite its financial success, the franchise was panned by critics with all of the movies landing “rotten” reviews and not faring much better with audiences. Now a whole new take on the franchise has become a huge box office hit and scored near-perfect reviews by not rehashing the same story and characters again, but that doesn’t mean the original movies have lost their audience. 10 years after it became one of the highest-grossing movies of the franchise, the film that brought the franchise to a close is once again a streaming hit on Netflix. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter may not have been the last entry in the franchise but it did stand by its word and end the run of films starring Milla Jovovich that turned the classic survival horror video game into the world’s highest grossing video game franchise at the time.
While Zach Cregger’s take on Resident Evil has been taking some heat online from fans of the original games for not including classic characters and storylines, Jovovich’s final movie playing Alice and crossing paths with several familiar characters while taking on mutants and zombies has had a resurgence. Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, The Final Chapter was one of the most successful movies in the franchise, earning itself the highest critics score of the six movies and turning a $40 million budget into a huge $314 million. The story picks up with Alice having survived the apocalypse and awakening to discover the Umbrella Corporation is in control of a virus that could destroy the world and she must fight to save humanity. The movie closed the book on Alice’s story, but that arm of the Resident Evil world still has plenty of fans out there and that has been proven by its current popularity on streaming.
Hollywood is full of movies that have been revived and regurgitated in several different forms with varying results. Resident Evil hit the big screen in 2003 and took several iconic moments from the 90s video game and built something around it that had just enough familiarity to please fans. Although the reviews did not get any better as more movies followed, Jovovich’s films continued to be a financial success right up to the last entry. Despite the flaws of the saga, subsequent attempts to reboot Resident Evil proved to be even harder than anyone could have expected, even when that included giving vocal fans exactly what they wanted and bringing a more faithful adaptation to a live action movie. The result was Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which was released in 2021 to a lukewarm $45 million mid-COVID-19 box office result and a planned sequel was quickly canceled.
While it seemed like that would be the end for Resident Evil, Netflix stepped up to attempt to bring the franchise to the small screen with a TV show that promised much but once again could not manage to please the vast majority of audiences. The show alienated game fans with its huge changes to lore and lacked the coherence for even those without any knowledge of Resident Evil’s past. The series was canceled after just one season. While that should surely have been the final nail in the coffin, no one counted on Cregger putting his own unique spin on things and delivering both the most highly-praised and financially successful iterations. Although Resident Evil‘s game story and mechanics seemed to be impossible to directly adapt for screen in any meaningful way, taking the principles of the franchise and carving out a new story managed to not only put Resident Evil on a new successful path but seemingly revived interest in the movies that went before it.
Which iteration of Resident Evil is your favorite? Let us know in the comments.
