The first entry in a 6-film franchise that was never any good retains a remarkable level of support 20 years on

A long-running film series spending the entirety of its existence being panned by critics has become an increasingly regular phenomenon, but it doesn’t really matter in the long run if each new installment continues to turn a tidy profit. That’s basically Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil series in a nutshell, which earned upwards of $1.2 billion in spite of never being any good.

The average Rotten Tomatoes score across all six films is a shade under 28 percent, and yet fans couldn’t get enough of them. To put that into context, Milla Jovovich’s ongoing adventures as Alice hold a median user rating on the aggregation site of roughly 55 percent. That means that the target audience effectively enjoyed Resident Evil twice as much as critics did, but still not enough to justifiable call the sci-fi horror saga anything even approaching above average.

And yet, a recent Reddit thread marking 20 whole years since the opening chapter arrived to recoup its $33 million budget three times over and then some at the box office has the rose-tinted glasses firmly in place, all while gifting us with a painfully early-2000s soundtrack that featured such luminaries as Mudvayne, Saliva, Static-X, Ill Nino, Five Pointe 0, and countless other nu metal bands you’ve completely forgotten about since you cast aside your baggy jeans, with the Resident Evil society reflecting on the opener’s merits in remarkably positive fashion.

A lot of the chatter focuses on the laser room scene, which still holds up as a suitably gnarly example of body horror goodness, even if the CGI hasn’t aged all that well. Given that reboot Welcome to Raccoon City tanked at the box office and Netflix’s episodic adaptation was loathed by the hardcores and canceled after one season, perhaps time will continue to be even kinder to the OG Resident Evil.