Insider Reveals TRUTH Of Netflix Resident Evil

5. Netflix And Capcom Had Very Few Notes For VFX Team

Bringing a property as complex as Resident Evil to life has several moving parts. Whilst the series is owned by game developers Capcom, production company Constantin Films have had the rights to the name for live-action media since the late 1990s. In 2020, they struck a deal with Netflix to produce an 8-episode series.

The VFX supervisor said that the famous streaming providers were very “hands off” and had very few notes for him and his team beyond early feedback on the CGI for the infected dog. If anything they had more “notes on the iPad facetime conversations” than the more visceral visual effects.

Just as quiet, Capcom had “literally no feedback” as the show was being made. Strangely, this was in contrast to Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City’s production where Lingenfelser said they “weighed in a lot on the creature design of the film”. It’s easy to suspect that Capcom were more invested in the film’s look and feel as it was more directly developing aspects from the games (not just monsters, but characters and locations too) whereas the Netflix show was a greater departure.

In a sadly telling moment, Lingenfelser remarked that Constantin Film wanted to “repurpose [CGI] models” such as the Licker. Regarding visual effects vendor Mr X (not named for the Resident Evil character), who had a long-standing relationship with Constantin Films, Lingenfelser said:

“And then Mr X, I was like… okay, you guys can do the Licker since you have a history with it, but the one thing you are not doing is you're not taking any of the previous models from the previous films and reusing those, repurposing those. Constantin wanted to do that because they wanted to save money.”