Get ready for Resident Evil to be adapted again, but this time… it’s a coming-of-age story? Netflix has officially announced a live-action adaptation of the Capcom zombie series that sounds inspired by the Capcom video game rather than adapted from it. Andrew Dabb (Supernatural) will be the series showrunner with Bronwen Hughes (The Walking Dead, The Journey Is the Destination) directing the first two episodes of the eight-episode, hour-long series. The series will be produced by Constantin Films, who made the Resident Evil movies and the upcoming Monster Hunter film.
The story will jump between two “timelines.” The first finds 14-year-old sisters Jade and Billie Wesker, new characters with a familiar surname, moving to New Racoon City, a company town. Netflix doesn’t name that company in its press release, but we can probably assume it’s Umbrella. As the sisters live there, in the full swing of adolescence, they begin to realize that it isn’t just some normal town set up for the company and that their father is hiding some pretty terrible secrets. Meanwhile, over a decade in the future, a 30-year-old Jade is surviving in an apocalyptic world with a population of fewer than 15 million while secrets about her sister, father, and herself haunt her.
When the Wesker kids move to New Raccoon City, the secrets they uncover might just be the end of everything. Resident Evil, a new live action series based on Capcom’s legendary survival horror franchise, is coming to Netflix. pic.twitter.com/XWh5XYxklD
— NX (@NXOnNetflix) August 27, 2020
Jumping between times periods is an interesting slant to take on a franchise that has been explored in so many different ways already thanks to a plethora of games, films, comics, and anime being done. It will definitely allow for the show to not waste its time in setting up an impending T-virus apocalypse and then unpacking it slowly over a few seasons. Now we get the downfall of mankind and the eventual apocalypse together at once. It’s not clear how much this series will overlap with the characters of the games (or even less likely the films), but it’s possible that the likes of Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield could be wandering around this New Racoon City.
No casting has been announced for the show yet. Executive producers are Hughes, Mary Leah Sutton, and Robert Kulzer and Oliver Berben of Constantin Film. Constantin Film CEO Martin Moszkowicz is acting as producer.
Now, the real question is whether or not they’ll be brave enough to take true inspiration from the original games and make everyone move like tanks and talk like they have never heard of what an emotion is.
