Netflix cancels Resident Evil after just one season

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Poorly received game tie-in won’t be back for a second season

SIENA AGUDON as YOUNG BILLIE, TAMARA SMART as YOUNG JADE, looking horrified in Netflix's Resident Evil
(Image credit: Netflix)

Just 44 days after making its Netflix debut, Resident Evil — the drama based on the long-running videogame zombie franchise — has been cancelled after eight episodes, Deadline reports.

As Netflix cancellations go, this one shouldn’t come as an enormous surprise, as the show failed both to get critical acclaim or dominate the most streamed list. As Deadline explains, a decent start quickly fizzled out, with the show dropping out of the platform’s top ten by its third week.

Nor did the reviews show signs of a sleeper hit in the making. While the critics at Rotten Tomatoes were pretty evenly divided with 55% finding it ‘fresh’, the audience score is far more clear: a damning 27% rating from nearly 3,000 reviews.

Kayla Cobb at Decider was also a fan. “Packed with humor, heart, and some of the coolest action scenes of the year, it’s a show that will leave you alternatively screaming at and cheering for your television,” she wrote.

But others were harsher. “It’s a show that’s “light on action and gore, and heavy on cliches,” according to The Daily Beast. “Consider this another failed Umbrella experiment,” writes Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com.

With two distinct plotlines separated by 14 years, it means that the show ends with not one, but two different sets of cliffhangers unsettled. Unfortunately, with Netflix cancellations for 2022 well into double figures, this is just an occupational hazard of starting any new show: there’s a good chance you’ll never get the satisfying resolution you want.

Alan Martin
Alan Martin

Freelance contributor Alan has been writing about tech for over a decade, covering phones, drones and everything in between. Previously Deputy Editor of tech site Alphr, his words are found all over the web and in the occasional magazine too. When not weighing up the pros and cons of the latest smartwatch, you'll probably find him tackling his ever-growing games backlog. He also handles all the Wordle coverage on Tom's Guide and has been playing the addictive NYT game for the last several years in an effort to keep his streak forever intact.