Despite the success of the video games, Netflix's Resident Evil series will not be continuing. The streamer has announced that the series, starring Ella Balinska, Paola Núñez, Lance Reddick, and Adeline Rudolph, among others, has been canceled after just one season. The show, which followed two split timelines during an outbreak of a deadly virus, received mixed reviews from fans and critics alike, and overall did not seem to live up to the legacy of the survival horror video game series that premiered in 1996 and continues to do gangbusters with its sequels to this day.
The series premiered a little over a month ago, and it had a somewhat strong start: It debuted at #2 on the Netflix “most-watched” list, but it failed to keep viewers interested enough to binge it or watch more episodes. The response from fans and general audiences was overwhelmingly negative: On Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds an audience score of only 22%, while on Metacritic fans were even crueler when showing how they felt about it – it has a 1.4 user rating.
Critics also didn’t have a very good impression of the series. Collider’s own Ross Bonaime said the series is “a biohazard that should be avoided”, and among the series’ issues, he listed its “tedious” Wesker family drama and problematic dialogue.
This is, of course, not the first adaptation of the Resident Evil video games to other media: Milla Jovovich (Monster Hunter) starred in a six-installment film series which also didn’t earn the best reviews, and last year Screen Gems released a feature film Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down) and starring Kaya Scodelario (The Maze Runner) as Claire Redfield, Robbie Amell (Upload) as Chris Redfield, and Hannah John-Kamen (Ant-Man and the Wasp) as fan-favorite Jill Valentine. The sci-fi horror film also failed to conquer critics: It has a 30% score on RottenTomatoes, while fans liked it a bit more, with 65% approval.
At the same time, this is not the end for the Resident Evil franchise on Netflix. Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness is an animated series that premiered in 2021, and centers around Claire and Leon trying to fight off hordes of zombies in the early 00s. Up until this point, Netflix has made no mention of the animated show’s future.
Recently, series star Lance Reddick talked to Collider about his experience as Albert Wesker and how he felt boarding a franchise that has such a huge fanbase across the world. You can check out that exclusive interview below and watch the first and only season of Resident Evil on Netflix.