Add Decider on Google Where to Stream: Resident Evil Powered by Reelgood More On: Zombies Stream It Or Skip It: ‘This is Not a Test’ on Shudder, a Drab and Annoying Zombie-Flick Riff on ‘The Breakfast Club’ Cannes Film Festival 2026: ‘Colony’ Brings ‘Train to Busan’ Director Yeon Sang-ho Back to Zombie Mayhem Stream It Or Skip It: ‘We Bury the Dead’ on Hulu, in Which Daisy Ridley Brings Some Heart to a Modestly Ambitious Zombie Flick ‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ Ending Explained: Does Cillian Murphy Fit Into The Proposed Trilogy? There have been four Sonic the Hedgehog movies, with a fourth in production for release next year. Mortal Kombat recently put out its fourth live-action movie and Street Fighter has a third crack coming this fall. Lara Croft has raided tombs at least three times on the big screen (and Prime Video is currently working on a new TV adaptation starring Sophie Turner as the bombshell archeologist). But no video game has inspired more major theatrical releases than Resident Evil.
With the latest Resident Evil movie hitting “restart” in theaters this weekend, there have been a whopping eight movies based on the series of zombie-centric video games from Capcom. Though they may not be as universally known as icons like Mario or Sonic, the Resident Evil games have been celebrated as particularly scary, cinematic, and immersive, so it makes sense that they’d become fodder for cinema. With the first game celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, it’s only natural that a new movie would accompany that milestone. But is Zach Cregger’s film really the title that Resident Evil newbies should start with?
Version Control has the answer. We examine multiple iterations of the same stories and properties to determine which one is most worth your streaming time and/or disposable income. Here, we’ll take a look at the three separate times that a cinematic Resident Evil adaptation kicked off — in 2002, 2021, and 2026 — through the lens of a movie-watcher more than a gamer. (Dedicated gamers have probably seen at least one of these at some point out of curiosity — or ignored them out of frustration.) None of them really rank among the best zombie movies ever made. They do, however, have their own creative strengths in approaching a well-worn subgenre.
Let’s figure out which version works best, going through these part ones in chronological order. Here are the Resident Evil movies, ranked:
Video game movies were not in great shape in the early 2000s. There was no billion-dollar standard-bearer like those Super Mario cartoons; Lara Croft: Tomb Raider had only recently become the biggest-grossing video game movie of all time. The only other big hit it passed to get there? The original 1995 adaptation of Mortal Kombat, directed by one Paul W.S. Anderson. Though not necessarily a gaming acolyte by nature, Anderson was ultimately handed another high-profile game-to-screen project: Resident Evil, which by that point had passed through a number of hands, including, amazingly, George A. Romero, the zombie maestro who seemed perfectly suited for the best-known zombie-shooting game. The studio didn’t see it that way, and Anderson got the job. It was fortuitous for him in a number of ways; not only did he become the shepherd to a hit franchise, but he met Milla Jovovich, whom he subsequently married. (They remain a couple to this day.)
This is all to say that the original Resident Evil is as much about Anderson and Jovovich’s whole deal as it is about the beloved game series — and at the same time, in terms of Jovovich/Anderson team-ups, some of their later work, within the franchise and outside of it, is actually a lot better. Resident Evil has an irresistible premise, with Alice (Jovovich) waking up without any memory of the mansion she appears to inhabit. She’s apparently working as security for the Umbrella Corporation facility underneath the house, where there has been a recent security breach. She joins a team heading down into the facility to find what turns out to be a rampant zombie-making virus, and everyone has to fight their way out.
There’s plenty to like about the movie, including Jovovich, an early role for Michelle Rodriguez, and a very memorable hallway sequence where some poor team members get sliced and diced by a red laser. But some of the later entries lean further into the action-sci-fi-horror hybrid that Anderson (who wrote all six movies in the series and directed four of them) clearly favors. As such, the third, fourth, and sixth entries, which incorporate ripoffs of Mad Max, The Matrix, and other classics in addition to the Romero stuff, are really the highlights here. Still, even the first movie is pretty high-tier as far as video game adaptations of the 2000s go.
Despite its departures from the game lore, the Resident Evil film series was consistently pretty popular at the U.S. box office. It was really sustained, though, by its massiveness overseas — to the point where the The Final Chapter, the sixth movie, made far less in North America than the others while still becoming the biggest-grossing installment worldwide on the strength of its $300 million in international money (especially in China and Japan). Following this 2017 finale, the property was rebooted in a way that would supposedly show more fidelity to the games. The result, Welcome to Raccoon City, bombed during the Thanksgiving season of 2021. (This itself was a baffling release-date decision, given the past sequels’ success in September and horror movies’ success in October.)
I can’t speak to Raccoon City as an adaptation of a video game that I do not play, but as an adaptation of John Carpenter movies in general, it’s pretty solid. Underrated, even. It follows Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) as she makes an ill-time returned to her hometown of Raccoon City, just as a zombie outbreak is starting to spread. Her brother Chris (Robbie Arnell) happens to be on the team tasked with quelling the outbreak, alongside game mainstay Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen).
With the desolate, mostly-abandoned vibes of a once-powerful blue-collar town, Welcome to Raccoon City becomes a series of Assault on Precinct 13-style standoffs and sieges, stylishly lit and shot by B-movie expert Johannes Roberts, who also made movies like Primate and The Strangers: Prey at Night way better than they needed to be. It failed to inspire a long-running series, and that may be just as well; John Carpenter didn’t make that many sequels either. But despite some thin characters and less badass action than the Anderson series, this one is fun while it lasts.
After the Raccoon City flop, the series got a faster-than-usual second reboot when Zach Cregger, the filmmaker behind Barbarian and Weapons, showed interest in the game as one of the few pieces of IP he might want to try his hands at adapting in a career he otherwise intends to be full of original material. His approach is both less and more akin to the game’s origins than the previous versions of the story. Cregger set out to replicate the creepy intensity of the game’s world and its imagery, only without any game-specific storylines — meaning that this movie takes place in the “world” of Resident Evil without featuring any of the characters established from the game series. (Jovovich’s Alice from the previous series isn’t a game character, but several of the supporting characters in those movies are.) Instead, it follows a courier (Austin Abrams) making a delivery to (uh oh!) Raccoon City Hospital whose night is thrown way off track and into the depths of hell by the emergence of, you guessed it, a zombie outbreak. Though for Abrams’s character, it starts off as a series of escalating mishaps: snowy roads, accidentally hitting a woman who darts in front of his car, stopped by a cop, and so on. It’s a much simpler story than the previous Resident Evil movies, and also, for whatever it’s worth, one that does a vastly better job at replicating the mission-based storyline and learning-the-buttons haplessness of playing a game for the first time. This might just be a clever novelty, though, if not for Cregger’s confident filmmaking, and, especially, the grounding performance from Abrams as a guy who isn’t the bravest, smartest, or strongest man in the world (or probably even his social circle), but valiantly attempts to complete his increasingly important work task in the midst of a spiraling catastrophe. He manages to be both hilariously bumbling and wonderfully likable. It’s terrific work that turns Resident Evil into something resembling a horror-comedy even though Cregger took care to excise a lot of his jokier elements. It should also play like gangbusters in a crowded multiplex.
The 2026 Resident Evil is easily the most all-around accomplished of the three “part one” editions (in large part because it could very well be a one-and-done rather than a franchise-starter). It’s very much worth seeing in a theater for any horror fans. That said, if you’re streaming-only for scary movies, the other two versions are both pretty good.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
