Resident Evil Movies in Order (Including All Animated Movies)
If you’re a gamer, the title Resident Evil is certainly known to you, whether you have actually played it or not. Capcom’s horror franchise is among the best-known video game franchises in history and although it’s not for everybody’s taste, Resident Evil has marked the history of (console) gaming and is one of Capcom’s best-selling and most lucrative brands in history. Now, due to the franchise’s immense popularity, it has been adapted into other media and this article is going to focus on the live-action and animated movies that comprise the franchise.
This article is going to be a chronological list of all the Resident Evil movies, including the most recent reboot, but also the animated works that have aired so far. We are going to talk about the movies and shows, answer some related questions and give you all the necessary production and plot-related information you need to know if you plan on watching the Resident Evil franchise.
How many Resident Evil movies are there?
The Resident Evil video game franchise began in 1996 when the first game was released. The first adaptation came out in 2000 with the release of the short film Biohazard 4D-Executer. Two years later, the American live-action film series debuted with 2002’s Resident Evil movie.
So far, there have been eight live-action movies and four animated movies. A fifth live-action entry, Zach Cregger’s ‘Resident Evil,’ opened in theaters on September 18, 2026, while the fourth animated film, ‘Resident Evil: Death Island,’ arrived in the summer of 2023. Animated series ‘Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness’ aired in 2021.
Resident Evil Watch Order At A Glance
- ‘Resident Evil’ (2002)
- ‘Resident Evil: Apocalypse’ (2004)
- ‘Resident Evil: Extinction’ (2007)
- ‘Resident Evil: Afterlife’ (2010)
- ‘Resident Evil: Retribution’ (2012)
- ‘Resident Evil: The Final Chapter’ (2017)
- ‘Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City’ (2021)
- ‘Resident Evil’ (2026)
- ‘Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness’ (2021)
- ‘Resident Evil: Degeneration’ (2008)
- ‘Resident Evil: Damnation’ (2012)
- ‘Resident Evil: Vendetta’ (2017)
- ‘Resident Evil: Death Island’ (2023)
Resident Evil movies in order
As said, we are going to talk about the live-action movies that comprise the franchise. The movies are going to be listed in the proper watching order and you’ll receive some basic production information on each of them. The animated material is going to be analyzed separately.
Resident Evil
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W. S. Anderson
Release Date: March 15, 2002
In a lavish mansion, a young woman named Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up in a bathroom with no memory. While looking for information and explanations relating to her amnesia, Alice meets a man named Matt, a city policeman, (Eric Mabius), and the two are captured by an elite commando who invests in the mansion. The soldiers (James One Shade (Colin Salmon), Rain Ocampo (Michelle Rodríguez), Chad Kaplan (Martin Crewes), JD Salidas (Pasquale Aleardi), Olga (the doctor) (Liz May Brice), and two other soldiers) are aiming to find the real reason for this quarantine, which turned, one might say, into a mess.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Director: Alexander Witt
Writer: Paul W. S. Anderson
Release Date: September 10, 2004
The Hive, the secret laboratory of a large biological research company, Umbrella Corporation, is hidden under an old mansion. In the Hive, the scientists of the Umbrella company were experimenting with biological weapons, until the day when a vial containing the T virus, voluntarily spilled, infected all the employees of the Hive, then soon most of the inhabitants of Raccoon City, transforming them into zombies with primary motor functions and subject to their primary needs (food, water, etc.).
Alice, a company security employee who had tried to betray her, was captured and then taken to a Raccoon City hospital, just after seeing the mansion’s last survivor, Matt, kidnapped before her eyes.
Resident Evil: Extinction
Director: Russell Mulcahy
Writer: Paul W. S. Anderson
Release Date: September 21, 2007
Three years after the events of Raccoon City, Alice (Milla Jovovich) wanders the Nevada desert in search of survivors. These are almost non-existent, the world being invaded by the T. In the meantime, a convoy of survivors, not far from Alice, crosses the desert with as leaders: Claire Redfield (Ali Larter), Carlos Olivera (Oded Fehr), LJ (Mike Epps), K-Mart (Spencer Locke), Betty (Ashanti), Mikey (Chris Egan) and Chase (Linden Ashby).
While in an underground Umbrella base, Doctor Isaacs (Iain Glen) tries to create a vaccine against the T virus, Alice discovers a notebook saying that an Alaskan town, Arcadia, is not affected by the virus. . The convoy wants to camp near a motel but inside, a zombie bites L.J, the latter not informing his comrades.
Resident Evil: Afterlife
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W. S. Anderson
Release Date: September 10, 2010
Five years have passed since the global pandemic caused by the T-virus. 18 months after having abandoned her companions and leaving for Arcadia, Alice arrives in Tokyo to attack and destroy the underground fortress of the Umbrella Corporation.
She gets there, at the cost of her clones, and is about to kill Albert Wesker in a helicopter, but the man injects her with a serum destroying all the powers she had acquired. The helicopter crashes into a mountain and Alice survives, but Wesker apparently does not.
Resident Evil: Retribution
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W. S. Anderson
Release Date: September 14, 2012
Alice (Milla Jovovich) wakes up in a residential suburb of Raccoon City. She is married to Todd, a perfect man strangely resembling Carlos Oliveira (Oded Fehr). She is the mother of Becky, a mute little girl. But what about the Umbrella Corporation and the infection? Was it just a dream?
Everything seems to be going well until the moment Alice and her family find themselves attacked by a horde of undead. The situation escalates and Alice’s life turns into a nightmare. The latter suddenly wakes up in an Umbrella Corporation cell, she realizes that it was all just a dream.
She is then released from her cell and subsequently meets Ada Wong (Li Bingbing), the right-hand man of Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who reveals to her that she is in one of the most important facilities of Umbrella Corporation, located in Russia and that now the Red Queen controls all infrastructure.
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
Writer: Paul W. S. Anderson
Release Date: January 27, 2017
As a result of previous events, humanity falters after Alice is betrayed by Albert Wesker in Washington, DC. As the last survivor of what should be humanity’s last stand against the hordes of zombies, Alice must return to where the nightmare began, in Raccoon City. Umbrella Corporation is gathering its forces there for a final assault on the last survivors of the Apocalypse.
In a race against time, Alice joins forces with old friends and an unexpected ally for a battle against hordes of zombies and mutant monsters. Between the loss of her powers and the attacks of Umbrella, it will be Alice’s most difficult adventure as she fights to save Humanity, one breath away from oblivion.
Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City
Director: Johannes Roberts
Writer: Johannes Roberts
Release Date: November 24, 2021
In 1998, Claire returns to Raccoon City, hitchhiking in a semi-trailer truck. While she is distracted, the truck driver runs over a woman walking down the road. When Claire and the driver investigate, the woman disappears. The truck driver’s Dobermann over time starts foaming at her mouth and her demeanor becomes erratic.
Meanwhile, Leon S. Kennedy, a rookie cop, wakes up on his first day with the Raccoon City Police Department. He goes to the restaurant in town where he falls asleep at the counter. Jill Valentine and Albert Wesker, who are also in the restaurant, wake Leon up when they leave. Leon notices that the owner of the restaurant is bleeding out of her eyes when a crow smashes into the window.
Resident Evil
Director: Zach Cregger
Writer: Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten
Release Date: September 18, 2026
Zach Cregger, the filmmaker behind ‘Barbarian’ and ‘Weapons,’ takes the franchise back to its horror roots with an entirely new story that skips past the mythology of the Milla Jovovich era altogether. Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a medical courier who picks up a high paying delivery gig on the same night his girlfriend tells him she is pregnant, only to find the job pulls him straight into a nightmare unfolding across Raccoon City. The film centers on Bryan working as a medical courier who transports organs between hospitals for transplant operations.
Paul Walter Hauser, Kali Reis, and Zach Cherry round out the cast, though they largely serve as one note characters Bryan encounters along his journey. Cregger has said the story leans closer to the tone of the fourth game while drawing more loosely from the second and third, and he built the film from thousands of hours spent with the games rather than from any of the previous eleven Resident Evil movies, since he has never actually seen one. Sony has described it as a self contained reinvention meant to set up future installments rather than a direct continuation of Paul W. S. Anderson’s or Johannes Roberts’s earlier films.
***
Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness
Original Release: July 8, 2021
Episodes: 4
The miniseries takes place in 2006, set between the events of Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5, after a hacking incident is discovered in the White House; Leon Kennedy is then ordered to investigate what happened. During the investigation, Leon encounters several zombies, while the White House is targeted by a mysterious attack. He later meets Claire who, while she works on a mission to oversee the construction of a relief facility for TerraSave, discovers a strange drawing made by a refugee child.
Resident Evil: Degeneration
Director: Makoto Kamiya
Writer: Shotaro Suga
Release Date: October 17, 2008
In 2005, seven years after the T-Virus outbreak in Raccoon City, Claire Redfield meets with a colleague from the human rights organization against Bio-terrorism, Terra Save at a Hardville airport. While she is keeping an eye on the niece of her partner Rani, they meet a British man with whom they sympathize on the views of bioterrorism until he withdraws from her.
Due to a leak about the arrival of Senator Ron Davis – one of the most important shareholders of the pharmaceutical company WillPharma – at the suggestion of his secretary, he tries to sneak through the main entrance, until he is recognized by Rani, which alerts the media and an activist against him.
Despite the efforts of the bodyguards to arrest the activist who confronts them personified as “Zombie”, an outbreak of the T virus originates at the airport when several infected begin to spread the virus, separating Claire from Rani while Davis pleads with him to Protect him as more turn into zombies and one of the planes that was about to take off crashes at the airport.
Resident Evil: Damnation
Director: Makoto Kamiya
Writer: Shotaro Suga
Release Date: October 27, 2012
Government agent Leon Scott Kennedy is sent to the Eastern Slav Republic, a small nation born after the enormous collapse of the USSR, to ascertain the use of BOW during the civil war that for years has seen the corrupt national government opposed oligarchic, led by the evil president Svetlana Belikova, and a fierce rebel group.
The rebels have in fact managed to get their hands on a new type of bio-organic technology, which exploits the power of the Plagas to allow a human being, contaminated by a Plagas Leader, to control several BOWs, in particular the Lickers, powered by parasites and able to be controlled as they have been created with subordinate Plagas to which the T virus has been assimilated.
These lickers are the final evolutionary stage of zombies, which having been created through the combination of the T Virus with the Plagas, are slightly more intelligent and able to transmit the infection by spitting other Plagas from their mouth.
Resident Evil: Vendetta
Director: Takanori Tsujimoto
Writer: Makoto Fukamim
Release Date: May 27, 2017
Leon Scott Kennedy walks through the cells of a morgue (probably to eliminate as many zombies as possible), thinking about the job he dreamed of doing as a child when he became an adult, but he never imagined his life would become this: destroying the undead.
In a military helicopter, bound for Mexico, sit several soldiers captained by Chris Redfield, with the intent to capture Glenn Arias, a biological weapons trafficker who has taken control of the Neo Umbrella and the Tricell (the first makes an appearance in Resident Evil 6 and the second in Resident Evil 5), as well as having a second objective; rescue an undercover B.S.A.An agent Cathy White and her son Zack were highlighted as “Missing Persons”.
Resident Evil: Death Island
Director: Eiichiro Hasumi
Writer: Makoto Fukami
Release Date: June 22, 2023
Set two years after ‘Vendetta,’ this fourth CG animated feature finally brings together the franchise’s most recognizable faces. D.S.O. agent Leon S. Kennedy sets out to rescue Dr. Antonio Taylor from kidnappers, while B.S.A.A. agent Chris Redfield investigates a zombie outbreak in San Francisco whose cause cannot be identified. The only clue tying the cases together is that every victim had recently visited Alcatraz Island, and Chris leads his team there to confront whatever new horror is waiting.
The film also marks the animated debut of Jill Valentine, joining Claire Redfield and Rebecca Chambers as the story splits across multiple perspectives before converging on the island. It stands as a sequel to ‘Vendetta’ and slots into the games’ timeline between ‘Resident Evil 7’ and the events that follow it.
Do you need to watch the Resident Evil movies in order?
As far as the live-action franchise is concerned, it follows an internal chronology that is unrelated to the video game narrative, so you don’t have to watch it in any specific order in relation to the video games. The best way is to simply follow the release order, as it is also the proper chronological order of the live-action narrative.
Will there be more Resident Evil movies?
The 2021 reboot ‘Welcome to Raccoon City’ underperformed with critics and at the box office, which is part of why Sony went back to the drawing board once again. That search led to Zach Cregger, and his new ‘Resident Evil’ opened in theaters on September 18, 2026, positioning itself as the second attempt at rebooting the live action franchise.
In January 2025, Cregger was announced as the co-writer and director of the film, which is intended to set up further entries rather than stand alone. Whether a sequel actually gets greenlit will depend on how this version performs with audiences worldwide, but early tracking suggests the studio may already have its answer.
