Resident Evil Games vs Movies: How the Films Differ From the Games

Alice was created for the films and is not a character in the games, which makes her the one lead of the Alice run who belongs to the movies alone. She is played by Milla Jovovich, who is billed first in all six films, and Alice is the thread that ties the saga together, from the first mansion to the final return to the Hive.

The first film shows one practical use for a lead with a blank slate. In Resident Evil (2002), directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, Alice wakes naked and with no memory in a large, empty mansion, so she learns what the Umbrella Corporation has done at the same pace as the audience. A commando team led by a man called One arrives, a computer called the Red Queen has sealed everyone inside the Hive, and every discovery lands on Alice first. Her missing memory lets the film introduce a lab, a conspiracy and a virus without a long briefing.

Her abilities change as the saga goes on. Alice is enhanced by the virus in Apocalypse, saves the convoy with her telekinetic powers in Extinction, loses them to Wesker in Afterlife and gets them back in Retribution.

The first run is a six film saga that uses recurring characters as supporting players around Alice. Paul W. S. Anderson directed four of them: Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil: Afterlife, Resident Evil: Retribution and Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. Alexander Witt directed Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Russell Mulcahy directed Resident Evil: Extinction.

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), directed by Johannes Roberts, resets the series in 1998 and drops Alice entirely. The lead is Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario), who returns to a dying Raccoon City to warn her brother Chris (Robbie Amell) that Umbrella is up to something.

The cast list reads like a roll call of familiar names: Claire Redfield, Chris, Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper), Leon Kennedy (Avan Jogia), Ada Wong (Lily Gao), William Birkin (Neal McDonough) and Chief Irons (Donal Logue). Lisa Trevor, a girl harmed by Umbrella's experiments, befriends Claire as a child and helps her again in the city's underground lab.

The story splits between the Spencer Mansion, where Chris, Jill, Richard Aiken, Brad Vickers and Wesker search for a missing team, and the town, where Claire and rookie officer Leon team up with Irons as the police station is overrun. Birkin injects himself with a new virus and becomes a monster, and the survivors flee on an underground train. Leon destroys the pursuing creature with a rocket launcher, and the group, including Birkin's young daughter Sherry, escapes as the city is destroyed. A post credit scene shows Wesker waking in a body bag before a woman gives him sunglasses and introduces herself as Ada Wong.

The film grossed about $42 million worldwide on a $25 million budget, according to The Numbers, the smallest figure of the eight.

Zach Cregger's Resident Evil (2026) keeps the town and the corporation from the series but follows a new character, Bryan, so it stands apart from both earlier runs. The story is set in Raccoon City General Hospital during the Umbrella Corporation's outbreak, and the film never names the virus outright.

The hero is Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier with no combat skills who takes a well paid delivery on a snowy night. A little girl bites him on the way, and inside the hospital he meets mutated victims with shifting, merging bodies, in the manner of John Carpenter's The Thing. He pushes up to a secure laboratory on the top floor, where lead scientist Carl lets him in and the package turns out to hold a key ingredient for an antidote meant for National Guard soldiers about to land on the roof.

The bite then takes hold. Bryan kills the scientists, absorbs them into his growing body and goes after the syringe holding the antidote. He and the last surviving scientist fall through a window, Bryan kills the man, and the syringe falls toward the ground. As helicopters close in, Bryan roars, and the last shot zooms into his eye and infected bloodstream. The reports describe no sequel setup.

Commercially it is the biggest of the eight. It opened with about $60 million in the US, a franchise best according to Deadline, and it has reportedly grossed about $400 million worldwide on a $75 million budget.