Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City will feature many famous characters from the video games, but Capcom's reluctance to allow them to die might hurt the reboot. Before Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City, the Milla Jovovich fronted film series may have received consistently lukewarm reviews, but they were massive box office hits too. The six movies collectively grossed over $1 billion worldwide, and remain the most successful video game to movie adaptations to date.
These Resident Evil movies may have borrowed creatures, characters and locations from the games, but they went in their own direction. Paul W.S. Anderson - who directed four of the films and produced them all - intentionally created a new protagonist in Alice, arguing that fans would know characters like Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine wouldn't die. Johannes Roberts' Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City will feature a return to the roots of the games; the focus will be firmly on horror over action and it will merge the storylines of the first two games.
Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City will thus feature series mainliners like Chris and Claire Redfield, Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, Ada Wong and others, and will compress the game plots to take place over one night. For fans, seeing the Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City's trailer feature live-action recreations of the Spencer Mansion or the RPD was bliss, but there is one Capcom mandate that could also hurt the film, in that no major characters from the series can die.
Followers of the series may have been confused by Jovovich's Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, which opened with Alice all alone in the aftermath of a battle. The previous adventure ended with her united with Leon, Add, Jill and others, but by The Final Chapter, not only had they vanished, they're not even mentioned. Jovovich herself later revealed in a Collider interview that the sequel needed a body count, so they created new supporting players because figures like Leon are "...are owned by Capcom and we’re not allowed to kill any of them off." Resident Evil: The Final Chapter's ending solution to this dilemma was fairly inelegant, but Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City has a unique issue on its hands.
The movie will feature nothing but fan-favorite characters as the protagonists, which means none of them are likely to perish. This goes doubly so if Capcom's rule against killing key figures is still in place for Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City. Audiences need to feel a certain sense of danger for the heroes, and while it's possible to create this without anyone being killed, this can also rob it of stakes too. Chris or Leon dying would be most unexpected - and likely controversial among some viewers - but it would underline the danger in a big way.
While the reboot will try to capture the game's scariest elements, Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City will likely feature all of its main characters surviving. It is worth noting that the Jovovich series did kill game characters like Barry Burton on occasion, but this was more the exception than the rule. The movie reboot may have some surprises up its sleeve, but unless Capcom has had a big change of heart since 2017's The Final Chapter, viewers shouldn't worry about the franchise's biggest characters not making it out alive.