There’s no shortage of franchises to have drastically overstayed their welcome, with the law of diminishing returns regularly setting in as the key creatives and studio bigwigs try to squeeze every last drop out of their most lucrative cash cows. To be fair, the six-film Resident Evil saga was never any good to begin with, but at least The Final Chapter managed to both live up to its moniker and go out with a bang.
The video game adaptations definitely had plenty of vocal supporters, though, given that they combined to earn over $1.2 billion at the box office. That being said, the average Rotten Tomatoes scores across the sextet from the 2002 original to The Final Chapter works out at roughly 28 percent from critics and 55 percent from audiences, so that’s not exactly widely-acclaimed cinema.
On the plus side, Milla Jovovich’s final outing as Alice did secure both the highest gross and warmest reviews of the Resident Evil run, thanks to $314 million in ticket sales and a 37 percent rating on the aforementioned aggregation site. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have ended sooner, but the husband-and-wife duo should be commended for pulling out all the stops to bow out on top.
Jovovich’s rogue warrior makes one final stand against the Umbrella Corporation with the fate of humanity at stake, with her and Anderson’s daughter Ever playing the villainous Red Queen in a nifty spot of nepotism. In all honesty, fans probably wish The Final Chapter wasn’t the final chapter given what happened to reboot Welcome to Raccoon City and Netflix’s canned series, but subscribers of ad-supported platform Freevee have elevated it onto the platform’s Top 10 most-watched list (per FlixPatrol), so Resident Evil is still proving worthy of drawing eyeballs to its unique charms.
