News culture Resident Evil: Netflix shortens the suffering of its series
Published on 08/27/2022 at 14:39
It’s official: the Netflix Resident Evil series has been canceled following just one short season. A series of factors, including the programme’s low viewership scores, led to the streaming giant abandoning the project altogether.
One season and then goes away
It’s official : Netflix is canceling its Resident Evil series following one season. The information, reported by Deadline, comes just a month and a half following the eight episodes were released on the streaming platform. Released on July 14, the program will have achieved quite honorable scores for its first week, accumulating 72.7 million hours of viewing. Nonetheless, things started to go downhill quickly in week two as it hit 73.3 million hours, only to finally crash out of the platform’s Top 10 in its third week.
This failure is justified by several factors. First of all, it is clear that the critical and public reception is far from laudatory: with 55% critical score and 27% audience score on RottenTomatoes, Resident Evil will absolutely not have won over viewers.
The other damaging factor is undoubtedly Netflix’s poor planning management. With the juggernaut Stranger Things as a neighbor at the same time, it was difficult for the series to do well.
When it doesn’t want, it doesn’t want
The Resident Evil adaptations have never really captured the public’s attention, whether for the average viewer or for fans of the video game license. At the top, we obviously think of the films of Paul WS Anderson (six in number, all the same) which have marked the spirits more thanks to their nanardesque aspect than by the quality of their story.
Films and animated series, for their part, have undoubtedly been more successful than films, but the fact remains that the Resident Evil saga has always struggled to stand out from generic zombie productions.
The latest movie, Welcome to Raccoon Citybarely reaches the average press side on AlloCiné, when the public gives it an average of 1.8/5. With the debacle of the Netflix series, no doubt that the producers should think twice before embarking on a project stamped RE.
However, the streaming giant’s program had serious tricks up its sleeve to win the hearts of fans. Set in the chronology of the games, the series made many references to previous events that occurred in the license and took up most of the creatures already faced by players. All the good will of the writers will not have been enough to save their series.
