Zach Cregger's Resident Evil ignores the timeline from the games, has no characters from the games, and is basically a completely original horror film set on the outskirts of Raccoon City. None of this is a bad thing, but it's funny to see history repeating itself so neatly.

Resident Evil is one of the best zombie films ever made, is better than anything George Romero ever made, and the fact it's always excluded from best zombie film rankings boils down to pure snobbery against Paul W.S. Anderson. It was this movie, not 28 Days Later, that revitalized the zombie genre as a box office force. When the film was in production everyone thought that spending 33 million dollars on a zombie film was insane. The idea that a zombie film could make serious money is because of this movie and its five sequels. Stuff like World War Z would never have been greenlit without it. Sony would NEVER have spent 60 million dollars on 28 Years Later.

When people say these movies are "nothing like the games", what do they mean, exactly? They seem quite a bit like the games to me, complete with the late 90s sense of cool paired with a kind of sly sense of camp. Granted, they more closely resemble the 90s and 2000s games than the modern, self-serious entries.

The reason Alice is the main character in the Resident Evil franchise is to avoid using one of the characters from the games because they are owned by Capcom and come with a lot of red tape. It's weird that 23 years later, people are still confused about why Resident Evil movies, including the upcoming reboot by Zach Cregger, have original protagonists.