A beloved gaming franchise’s latest foray into live-action is proving a success with audiences, with Resident Evil crawling after the top spot held by Stranger Things on Netflix.
After several mostly poorly received films starring Milla Jovovich, the horror series was given a new lease of life via a Netflix original series. Fans and critics are starkly divided in opinion, but it seems as if general audiences are anything but with the series just behind Stranger Things in terms of viewership.
Sitting at #2 on the global charts, it’s a good time to be a zombie enthusiast with Netflix access. In its first week on the streaming service, it’s seen 72 million hours view time globally, an astonishing feat for a first season. It is still massively dwarfed by Stranger Things‘ fourth season, which has consistently seen 100 million hours minimum viewed per week since release.
It has a long way to go to top another record for Netflix for views over the first 28 days. Stranger Things 4 became the first English-language show to hit 1 billion hours view time in its first month. To get close to that, the next three weeks would require a massive cultural and word-of-mouth shift.
In those 72 million hours viewed, its something that audiences saw early on they’re still utterly baffled by though. The pilot episode of Resident Evil saw the main character reference Zootopia erotica and “4chan virgins”, because obviously those are very hip topics in 2022.
Resident Evil’s first season is currently available to stream on Netflix.
