Well, here we go again. The Resident Evil franchise is a very curious thing, because in terms of its games, it went from a record high to a record low, and then was reborn with incredible vigor that many hope won’t drop again. In terms of its live-action adaptations, you’ll hear different things from different people. On one hand, it does have the record for the long-running video game adaptation in terms of the Mila Jovovich films. They weren’t always quality, nor exactly true to the games themselves.
Then, people tried to adapt it in two different ways within a short time. There was the “Welcome to Raccoon City” movie which tried to fuse the first two game’s stories into one entity. It didn’t work out and the movie bombed pretty hard. Then, there was the Resident Evil series that aired on Netflix earlier this year and had some big names like Lance Reddick in it. He played Albert Wesker.
There were a lot of hopes with this adaptation as the series would potentially go and flesh out the story in the ways that the movies couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. The problem was when it was released it was a major failure. It did fair enough in the views at first, but then it dropped off the charts in just a few weeks’ time. In contrast, the recent comic adaptation of The Sandman has been dominating Netflix ever since it came out.
Furthermore, the critical and fan reception of the series was very bad–55% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and 27% from fans. That’s not good, at all. In fact, there were some who actually tried to debate which was worse, the Netflix series, or the recent movie. When you’re doing that kind of a debate? You did something wrong.
The other problem with this cancelation is two-fold in the literal sense. While Netflix did cancel this series, they’re already gearing up for their next video game adaptations. Specifically, they’re making a Bioshock movie, and a series based on the Horizon Zero Dawn franchise. That’s two different stabs at two different games in two different ways. One would hope that one of them will be good, but given what Netflix has done at times, it’s not a guarantee at all.
What’s worse is that this further puts video game adaptations down a hole. By that, we mean the hole of quality that it just can’t seem to dig itself out of. Every time we get a good adaptation and build hope up, a bad one like this series ruins it. Will it ever end? At this point, the answer is no.
Source: Deadline