Netflix announces premiere date for Lance Reddick’s Resident Evil series

Now that the big-screen Resident Evil reboot and Netflix’s own throwback to the original Resident Evil video game timeline have both come and gone, we can all refocus our attention on the third Resident Evil adaptation that has been in the pipeline: Netflix’s live-action TV reboot that is unrelated to… anything else in the Resident Evil canon, except maybe the first video game? Simply titled Resident Evil, because god forbid something with this franchise not be confusing, the show stars Lance Reddick as longtime series villain Albert Wesker as he deals with the aftermath of a zombie virus outbreak and the constant pressures of being a father.

Today, Netflix announced that its Resident Evil series will premiere on July 14, and it also put out some new teaser art that is A.) very yellow and B.) features a vial of blood that—according to the handy label—is infected with the T-Virus. For those who don’t know, the T-Virus is the original zombie virus from the first video game, the one that turns people into mindless zombies (except when it turns people into big monsters). It was created by the Umbrella Corporation, an evil pharmaceutical company that the aforementioned Albert Wesker was involved with.

Over the course of the games, Wesker becomes a super-powered monster-man using Umbrella’s research and he masterminds various zombie virus breakouts and global disasters, up until the point where he gets punched into a volcano. The Netflix show is explicitly taking place on a different timeline, with Deadline saying it’s 2036, “14 years after a deadly virus caused a global apocalypse.” (That puts the virus apocalypse at 2022! That’s fun!). The plot of the show involves one of Wesker’s daughters trying to figure out what connection he has to Umbrella, which means that he both has a family and isn’t spending his life loading himself up with every bit of monster-juice that Umbrella can cook up.

All of that means that it’s not explicitly tied to any existing Resident Evil canon, be it the old movies or the new movie or the games or whatever. It’s a big swing, considering how many reboots this series has gotten, but maybe it’ll work out this time.