Netflix cancels the Resident Evil series after just one season

Just over a month after the release of its debut season, the Netflix Resident Evil series starring Ella Balinska, Tamara Smart, and Lance Reddick has been cancelled.

News of the cancellation comes from Deadline, which said that the series did not perform particularly well. It debuted in second place on Netflix's top 10 with 72.7 million hours viewed (which sounds like an awful lot to me), but it didn't see a meaningful rise in week two, drawing 73.3 million hours viewed for a third-place finish, a sign that it was not getting a word-of-mouth bump. In week three, it fell out of the top ten entirely.

The Resident Evil series also performed poorly with critics and viewers. It's got a 55% critical rating at Rotten Tomatoes, and just a 27% average audience score.

It's an unfortunate conclusion to a series that—okay, I can't say it had promise, strictly speaking, but it did have Lance Reddick as the iconic villain Albert Wesker, and that's a pretty strong start in my book. The final trailer had a certain “generic zombie flick” vibe to it (although that giant spider was pretty awful) but that's not necessarily a bad thing if Netflix was looking to move meaningfully beyond the boundaries of the existing Resident Evil fanbase. I guess that's not happening now.

This was actually Netflix's second Resident Evil series, following Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness. It sucked too, but hasn't been formally cancelled yet.