Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich may have moved on, but Resident Evil is set to be a larger presence than ever on the big and small screens over the coming years. Feature film reboot Welcome to Raccoon City was announced just a few months after the aforementioned duo brought their six-movie series to a close, and the prequel inspired by the first two console classics will arrive in November.
Netflix are also betting big on the Resident Evil brand, with animated show Infinite Darkness set to premiere this summer and a live-action episodic project in the works, too, which is tentatively penciled in to start production before the end of the year. Business is booming, then, and the streaming service have now added the third and fourth movies from the Anderson and Jovovich back catalogue to the library.
Resident Evil remains the highest-grossing string of video game adaptations ever after combining to haul in over $1.2 billion at the box office, and despite a consistently tepid reaction from critics, the adventures of Alice Marcus gathered a huge fanbase. That being said, Extinction and Afterlife aren’t regarded as high points, boasting respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of just 22% and 24%, but they deliver exactly what people expected to see.
They’re a pair of glossy, horror-tinged action movies, with Jovovich continuing to reassert her credentials when it comes to onscreen badassery, even if the plot and character development leaves a lot to be desired, although that was hardly the selling point of the franchise by any stretch of the imagination. In any case, if everything goes to plan for Netflix, then the platform will become synonymous with Resident Evil, with Extinction and Afterlife well-placed to draw in a decent audience given the enduring popularity of the property.