While the earnings would obviously indicate that there’s a substantial audience there, recent history has nonetheless continued making a point of noting that maybe it’s for the best if live-action Resident Evil adaptations go away for a while.
Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich’s six-film stint as the figureheads of the franchise may have yielded a cumulative box office haul of over $1.2 billion to secure a place in the history books as the highest-grossing string of console-to-screen movies ever made, but let’s not overlook the fact that the highest-rated of them all holds a Rotten Tomatoes score of 37 percent.
And yet, reboot Welcome to Raccoon City arrived way too soon afterwards, only to go down in a ball of flames among critics, fans of the source material, and paying customers alike. Undeterred, Netflix got into the Resident Evil business with the resoundingly-panned series that was mercifully canceled after a single season, and yet there are rumors whispering that yet another reimagining is on the way sooner rather than later.
Having gone zero-for-eight in live-action so far in terms of acclaim, does anybody desperately need more Resident Evil adventures in their lives funded by Hollywood? Hopefully not, but FlixPatrol revealing that the 2002 original is currently one of the most-watched features on the Paramount Plus global charts does paint the unsettling picture that after more than two decades of mediocrity, there’s still a sizeable audience out there willing to dive back into the adventures of Alice and her never-ending battle against the infected.