RESIDENT EVIL (2026): A Review

The adaptation of a video game franchise can be a difficult thing. The 90’s and 00’s were littered with adaptations that sort of brought the experience of the original material to the big screen (Street Fighter (1994, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the original Mortal Kombat movies), but in recent years, the needle has been moved in the other direction: perhaps too accurate to the source material. This choice ends up with mixed results, as we’ve seen this year. Either you’re a 1:1 comparison to the original storytelling, flaws and all (Mortal Kombat II), or you feel like a YouTube compilation of cutscenes (The Super Mario Galaxy Movie). So how do you make it work? A side story. 2026’s relaunching of Resident Evil as a film franchise doesn’t try to be something it’s not — it’s not a big action movie like the Paul WS Anderson films, nor is it a 1:1 adaptation of one of the games in the series. Instead, this feels like its own unique beast — if it were a video game, it’d be your portable…