The Resident Evil franchise lovers might have been disappointed following the news that the movie streaming network, Netflix, has cancelled the first action-packed series.
In this piece, we provide some of the factors that fueled Netflix’s decision to press the cancel button.
For streaming platforms, ratings and watch hours mean everything and when a project fails to provide either or both of these, just like Resident Evil and some other projects that will not be listed in this article, fall to the axe.
The decision was made six weeks after Resident Evil made its debut on July 14 and after the streamer’s internal and external metrics revealed the show didn’t have a long shelf life with viewers.
After numerous video game and film adaptations and an animated series on Netflix that debuted in 2021, the series was the first live-action series in the media-spanning Resident Evil universe. The majority of it takes place in 2036, 14 years after a deadly virus sparked a worldwide apocalypse, and it centres on a young woman (Ella Balinska) who must battle zombies and other monsters for her life.
Lance Reddick, Tamara Smart, Siena Agudong, Adeline Rudolph, Paola Nuez, Ahad Raza Mir, Connor Gosatti, and Turlough Convery are also featured in the cast.
Both Nielsen’s streaming measurement (858 million minutes, or 14.3 million hours) and Netflix’s public rankings (72.7 million hours viewed globally in its first week) indicate that Resident Evil had a respectable first week. It declined significantly in the final week of July, declining by 62 percent in Netflix’s measure and dropping off Nielsen’s top 10 original streaming series chart. It was relatively flat in its second week, though (73.26 million hours globally, according to Netflix; 772 million minutes/12.87 million hours in the U.S., according to Nielsen).
Additionally, the show’s Netflix release schedule was sandwiched between the conclusion of Stranger Things and the highly publicised premiere of The Sandman.
Resident Evil’s showrunner was Andrew Dabb (Supernatural), who also served as an executive producer alongside Mary Leah Sutton, Robert Kulzer, and Oliver Berben of Constantin Film. Martin Moszkowicz, the CEO of Constantin, is a producer on the series.