Here's why the Resident Evil movies starring Milla Jovovich were poor adaptations of the games. Seeking to reboot the RE film franchise, Sony will unleash Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City on the world, which looks set to be a much closer adaptation of the interactive source material. That said, it's clearly not sticking to the games completely, as lots of visible changes can be seen in the trailers and TV spots. Some changes were a given, as Welcome to Raccoon City made the odd choice to adapt the first two Resident Evil games into one movie.
Even so, Welcome to Raccoon City doesn't have to be a spot-on adaptation in order to outdo the Jovovich movies in that department, as their plots bore very little resemblance to the games. While some Resident Evil game characters appeared in the movies, they often felt off, acting or looking differently, and serving a different function in the story than they had before. No matter if heavy game hitters like Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine showed up, they always eventually took a backseat to Jovovich's Alice, much to the consternation of original Resident Evil fans.
Regardless, differing so much from the games didn't do much to hurt the prospects of Jovovich's Resident Evil franchise, as most non-gamer audiences didn't seem to care much. They were happy to go on the journey Jovovich and writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson were ready to take them on, as evidenced by a six-movie run. For his part, Anderson believed that separating his movies from the games allowed for more creative freedom, while preventing those who had played the games from knowing where things would go. Anderson said the following on the subject to Movie Web:
"If you look at the game, while the Alice character is not in the game, the archetype certainly is. There's a lot of very strong female characters that you get to play as in the game. By having a completely fresh character and telling a prequel story to the world of the video games, it gave us some more dramatic license that we wouldn't have had if we had just done a straight adaptation of any one of the games."
Anderson has also said on other occasions that making established characters from the Resident Evil games the focus would serve to make the outcome easier to predict, thereby lessening the tension. Resident Evil movie star Milla Jovovich also revealed that Capcom had a pretty strict rule against killing the game characters, one that was only broken on two occasions, with the relatively minor supporting characters of Carlos Oliveira and Barry Burton, who isn't part of the Resident Evil movie reboot. That lends credence to Anderson's logic surrounding centering his movies around an original creation like Alice.
On one hand, Anderson isn't wrong when he asserts that not sticking closely to the games made the prior Resident Evil movies harder to predict, as far as plot twists go. Yet, many movies based on beloved existing material adapt their source to a strict degree, though they aren't necessarily lambasted by audiences because of that. Those who already enjoy the source material usually enjoy seeing their favorite moments adapted into live-action, while those who haven't engaged with the source - or in this case played the games - probably wouldn't know how their stories turn out anyway. Anderson's instincts proved correct, at least in the sense that Jovovich's Resident Evil movie franchise has earned over $1.2 billion worldwide. Either way, the world will get to judge whether making a more accurate adaptation of the games is the better idea when Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City hits theaters.
