Why Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City Reminds Fans To Be Careful What They Wish For

There are now a plethora of entries in the popular "Resident Evil" video game franchise. And in 2002, the first "Resident Evil" movie, written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, was released, much to the excitement of horror fans and gamers alike. 

While inspired by the popular games of the same name, the movies of this live-action franchise took the storyline in a different direction. The basic premise was similar — a pharmaceutical corporation named Umbrella created a viral bioweapon that, of course, eventually gets out of containment and wreaks havoc amongst the masses, turning all it comes into contact with into horrible monsters — but the films largely focused on their own storyline. Series protagonist Alice (Milla Jovovich), an amnesiac Umbrella test subject with superhuman abilities, and her journey were created specifically for the films. This inevitably left some fans of the games frustrated that they hadn't received a more faithful live-action adaptation.

While there were a total of six movies released in that series, none of them closely followed the narrative of the video games themselves. That all changed with the 2021 reboot of the live-action film franchise, "Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City," which promised a direct adaptation of the now-iconic first two games in the series. That alone was enough to get fans of the franchise excited in anticipation of the movie. However, some found themselves disappointed with the outcome.

The 2021 film "Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City," directed by Johannes Roberts, gave fans a lot to look forward to with its promise to bring the first two games of the "Resident Evil" franchise into movie form. In an interview with SYFY Wire, Roberts expressed what he had hoped would be the fan's reaction to the film when he said, "I really want people to sit there and enjoy being scared and having fun ... this really loving adaptation of a game. And yeah, just have a blast. I hope. I really hope they do." Many fans of the franchise, however, had a different reaction.

Redditor u/RuggedTheDragon started a thread about "Welcome to Raccoon City" with a post criticizing the movie for everything from bad pacing to the unforgivable sin of crummy zombies. In a reply, u/Wolfred240 said "Welcome to Raccoon City" was so bad that they prefer the previous franchise films, which were mostly written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. They wrote, "if I'm being given a choice between 2 RE movies between Anderson and ['Welcome to Raccoon City'], I'd choose Paul's movies since we already know that movie series ain't gonna live up to the lore while WRC CLAIMS to accurately represent the franchise ..." 

Meanwhile, u/cvele89 criticized what they saw as lazy fan service. "We are not looking into a scene-to-scene copy of the game into a movie," they argued, "we are simply looking for something that looks familiar and which still looks composed good enough for casual movie viewer to understand."

We look forward to hearing what these fans have to say about the live-action Netflix "Resident Evil" series, which drops July 14, 2022.