Resident Evil‘s latest foray into live action is headed back to the grave with the announcement that the critically-maligned Netflix show that shares a name with the videogame series — but otherwise bears almost no resemblance to the franchise — has been canceled after just one season.
With the show having premiered only last month, Netflix decided to give the axe to Resident Evil in the wake of its purported “cost vs. viewing” renewal criterion, following the series’ middling ratings and critical reception, according to Deadline.
Though it was considered a guilty pleasure to some, most fans of the videogame were baffled at the attempt at an apocalyptic zombie drama. Many people contended that Netflix’s Resident Evil seemed to have the potential to be fairly decent if it were its own intellectual property, but that it did not deliver in terms of staying true to the source material.
The standout performance of the show was undoubtedly Lance Reddick’s Albert Wesker, a scientist who works for the Umbrella Corporation, the evil pharmaceutical company responsible for a modern-day zombie outbreak and the creators of numerous unspeakable monsters, such as a giant alligator and a giant spider. Jumping in time between the pre-zombie-ridden-era of 2022 and the post-zombie-outbreak-era of 2036, the show focused on Wesker’s two daughters, Ella Balinska’s Jade Wesker and Adeline Rudolph’s Billie Wesker, as its main characters; Tamara Smart and Siena Agudong also played the younger Jade and Billie, respectively.
This all comes during what is arguably an oversaturation of Resident Evil content in media lately, despite director Paul W.S. Anderson’s notoriously over-the-top action movie franchise starring Milla Jovovich being largely retired from cinema screens. Another animated Netflix show in the franchise, Infinite Darkness, and a rebooted theatrical movie, Welcome to Raccoon City, both garnered similarly low critical scores and poor fan reactions when they each released just last year.
Meanwhile, the videogame franchise from Capcom appears to be back on track in recent years with the terrifying Resident Evil 7 and 8 both being hits with critics and fans alike. Before that, the franchise’s foray into more of an action focus, with Resident Evil 5 and 6, struck many fans as straying too far from the game’s survival horror roots.