100 Things You Never Knew About Resident Evil

2021's Welcome to Raccoon City should've been so much better than it was. Under-budgeted and running at just over an hour and a half, it had the unenviable task of not just telling one Resident Evil story but two concurrently.

It's tricky business regardless, but there were other factors at play. Director Johannes Roberts has recounted a meeting with Constantin Film producer Jeremy Bolt three years before the film's release and that he wound up playing Resident Evil 2 Remake - which was brand new at the time - whilst writing the spec script. This means that the film's concept got approved either before or just in the wake of the release of RE2R. It might seem like an obvious thing to adapt now considering how massive that game became, but at the time it was quite the risk. Nobody knew that it would go on to perform as well as it did, commercially.

Sticking to their guns probably paid off on that front, as if REmake 2 had failed they would've found themselves adapting a game that nobody cared about which is a much harder sell. If nothing else the film had the recognisable visuals of the game's Raccoon City Police Department going for it.

It's just a shame it had so much stopping it from being, y'know, good.