Echoing what true artistic appreciators of the franchise have been saying now for decades—i.e., that the rich characters, dense narratives, and sophisticated key-finding and crank-turning mechanics of Capcom’s Resident Evil series would really work better in the more relaxed confines of television, rather than as an improbably successful series of cheapie action movies where Milla Jovovich plays a sort of violent murder angel—Deadline is reporting that Netflix is putting a TV version of the zombie-shooting series into the works. To be fair, the company already has one moderately successful video game TV adaptation in its roster, in the form of the animated Castlevania, which probably made this an easier call to make; also, fuck you, they’re Netflix, they’ve got the money.
Said money is headed, apparently, toward Constatin Film, which also produced the Resident Evil films. It seems unlikely that the show will follow the eventually apocalyptic aftermath of that earlier take on the franchise, though; presumably it’ll reboot back to basics with a bad company making bad zombies with a bad virus in a bad house, then expand back into crazytown (a.k.a. Raccoon City, U.S.A., where all public services require users to perform elaborate, ridiculous puzzles to access them) from there. The studio is also reportedly working on a reboot of the films themselves, because hey—what with the game franchise running on a critical and commercial high-point at the moment, and zombies a perennial strong pop culture pick—it apparently seems like the undead getting is pretty good.
