Insider Reveals TRUTH Of Netflix Resident Evil
Was the video game adaptation doomed from the start?
Touted as one of the biggest missteps in video game adaptations, Netflix's Resident Evil show was derided by critics and utterly destroyed by fans when it debuted this summer.
Two weeks ago, Netflix announced that they wouldn't be renewing the show for further seasons which was met with a range of emotions. Even those who had appreciated some of the steps in took to forge it's own identity agreed that it wasn’t much of a surprise that the service wouldn’t be moving forwards with it. Not only had it been publicly pulled over the coals, it was also very clearly an expensive show to create.
I was recently privileged to sit down with Kevin Lingenfelser, the visual effects supervisor for the show, for an episode of the First Aid Spray Podcast. With the show firmly in the rear-view mirror; Kevin, who has 30 years of experience in film, gave a candid interview that touched on many of the issues that the show faced throughout its production, as well as in-depth notes about what was planned for the future that it will never get.
Whilst, as the lead on the visual effects, Lingenfelser didn’t have much say on the story of the series, he did recount several behind the scenes tales that paint a concerning picture of a show that was lucky to even make it to release in one piece.
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.”