FILM · 2016 · GERMANY
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
46 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (46)
- #001
Stunt performer Olivia Jackson was involved in a motorcycle accident during filming. The dangerous stunt required her to ride her motorcycle toward a crane-mounted camera without wearing a helmet. The crane malfunctioned and did not move in time. Noticing this, she tried to block it with her arm (and failed). She suffered many life-threatening and serious injuries, including a twisted spine, broken discs, a brain hemorrhage, a shattered shoulder blade, torn nerves, leaking brain fluid, a degloved face (when the facial skin is torn away to expose muscle tissue and teeth), a shattered eye socket that had to be reassembled with tweezers, a cheekbone fragment lodged in her eardrum, fingers torn from her hand, and an entire bone torn from her arm. Her left arm, which took the impact, was so severely injured that it had to be amputated. She was kept in a medically induced coma for 17 days to perform all the surgeries. Paul W. S. Anderson was so devastated by the accident that he nearly abandoned the project. Milla Jovovich visited Jackson in the hospital and brought her flowers. Jackson sued the production company over the workplace injuries (and won), because she was initially paid only $33,000 in compensation for the injuries.
- #002
During filming in South Africa, a Humvee that had not been properly secured slid off a rotating platform and crushed crew member Ricardo Cornelius against a wall. He was taken to the hospital and placed on life support, and died a few hours later. This was the film's second set accident and its only fatal one. The film is dedicated to his memory.
- #003
Megan Charpentier reprised the role of the Red Queen, which she had previously played in Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), and was brought back by Milla Jovovich and Paul W. S. Anderson. Anderson's real-life daughter, Ever Anderson, appears in her first feature film.
- #004
After the premiere of this final Resident Evil film, a TV series was expected to be developed, but instead a reboot of the film was announced. Both ideas came to fruition with the rebooted film Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) and a standalone Netflix original series briefly titled Resident Evil (2022). Both follow their own continuity and have no connection to Paul W. S. Anderson's films.
- #005
Filming was originally planned to begin in the fall of 2013 for a September 12, 2014 release date. Production was postponed after Milla Jovovich became pregnant with her and director Paul W. S. Anderson's second child.
- #006
The memories Alicia Marcus uploads for Alice at the end of the film are actually real-life home videos of Ever Anderson (the Red Queen/young Alicia). Her father, director Paul W. S. Anderson, and her mother, Milla Jovovich (Alice), found that using them in the film worked perfectly. Several of the photos can also be seen on Milla's Instagram account.
- #007
Milla's daughter Ever was initially supposed to shoot for only two days as young Alicia with no dialogue. She was later asked to stand in for the Red Queen as a reference for the visual effects, but she was so good that they decided to use her in the actual film. In the end, she had to learn more dialogue than anyone else in the film.
- #008
Although the film was released four years later, it takes place three weeks after the events of Resident Evil: Retribution (2012). What happened to Jill Valentine (Sienna Guillory), Ada Wong (Bingbing Li), Leon S. Kennedy (Johann Urb) and Becky (Aryana Engineer), who survived the previous film but do not appear in this one, is never explained, so they are all implied to have died off-screen during the White House battle (the novelization is more explicit about their fates). In reality, Engineer did not return because she had outgrown the role, Li had other commitments, and Guillory was not asked.
- #009
Sienna Guillory announced on Twitter that she was never asked to join the project to reprise the role of Jill Valentine. She nevertheless thanked all the fans for their support of her performance as the character.
- #010
Ali Larter returns as Claire Redfield in the film. The character was last seen in Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010). Larter was absent from Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) because she was pregnant at the time.
- #011
Although every sequel revisits certain aspects of the previous story, this sequel does so the most. The changes include: * Wesker's explanation in the previous film about the end of the world (an Umbrella-fueled global bioweapon arms race in which every nation wanted the T-Virus for itself) was reworked, and the explanation given in the films up to that point was partly repaired (winds and planes, rather than rats, spread the original Raccoon City infection). * The ending of the last film, which implied a great final reckoning at the White House between the last of the survivors, including Wesker, and the heroes of the video games and an army of the undead seen in the preceding sequels, is never fully addressed. The fate of Alice's allies from the previous film is also never fully addressed. * Wesker suddenly becomes a villain once again, and the Red Queen, once again modeled on a different child character (here Dr. Marcus's daughter, in the second film Dr. Ashford's daughter), is now Alice's ally. * A different explanation is given for the identity of the creator of the T-Virus than in the second film (in the second film Dr. Ashford created the T-Virus to help his sick daughter, on whom the Red Queen's avatar was based, but in this film it was Dr. Marcus, on whose sick daughter the Red Queen's avatar was based, who created the virus to help his own sick daughter). * Although in the first film Umbrella appears unaware of the T-Virus's zombie-transforming side effect, it is implied that the Hive incident in the first film was not the virus's first outbreak. * Although Wesker and Dr. Isaacs were enemies in previous films and Wesker was Isaacs's boss, they are now allies and Wesker is Isaacs's servant. The only explanation given is the possibility that some of them may be clones from earlier films. * Alice herself is shown to be a clone, but it is not explained why the T-Virus, which gave her clones such supernatural abilities, was never tested on the original, sick Alice. * The laser grid defense in the room adjacent to the Red Queen's CPU room never uses the inescapable laser pattern that killed half the reconnaissance team in the original film.
- #012
Some YouTubers who were in Cape Town, South Africa for a convention were given the chance to appear as zombies in the film.
- #013
The outfit worn by Ali Larter's character Claire Redfield is the same outfit Claire Redfield wears in the game Resident Evil: Revelations 2 (2015).
- #014
With only $26.8 million in domestic box office, this film became the lowest-grossing film in the entire series. However, when overseas markets are taken into account, the film's worldwide box office was $312 million, meaning it is actually the highest-grossing Resident Evil film in the entire series, surpassing Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), which grossed $296 million worldwide.
- #015
95% of this film was shot with a handheld camera controlled by the director himself.
- #016
Bingbing Li was to reprise the role of Ada Wong but had to leave the production before filming began because she was pursuing another film in China.
- #017
After criticism from fans that the film resolved none of the loose ends left by the previous films, the novelization attempted to fill the gaps. It states that Ada, Leon and Jill, who do not appear in this film, died in the Washington battle, that Jill was stabbed through the eye by Wesker's tentacle, and that Ada and Leon were devoured by a mutant. Becky hid and was eventually reunited with Alice. Claire explains that after the attack on Arcadia, she and her brother Chris were taken away in separate helicopters and that she never saw him again, but hopes he is all right. K-Mart is not mentioned in the novelization, so it is presumed she died aboard the Arcadia along with the rest of the survivors. The White Queen's absence is also explained by saying that she is in fact the same kind of artificial intelligence as the Red Queen and not a different AI. The inventor of the T-Virus is also explained by revealing that Dr. Ashford designed the virus's progenitor cell, that Dr. Marcus took his work and improved it, and that both worked on the experiment. Wesker's sudden weakness is also explained by saying that, because of the decline in the human population, he had not fed on fresh DNA for some time, so his regenerative powers were not as strong, and that this is why he coughed up blood even though only his leg had been crushed. Unlike the film, in which he definitely dies, the novelization strongly implies that Wesker survived the explosion. The novelization also rewrote a scene much criticized in the film, in which Alice secretly slips a bomb into the pocket of Isaacs's jacket in the laser corridor, and the bomb explodes a few inches from the Anti-Virus vial in his other pocket, replacing the vial with the bomb instead.
- #018
In interviews with many media outlets, including IGN and Cinema Blend, Ali Larter confirmed that this film is indeed the final chapter.
- #019
It is revealed that Alice is a clone of Alicia Marcus and therefore also the Red Queen's "relative." Fittingly, the latter is played in this film by Milla Jovovich's real-life daughter.
- #020
(Around the 9th minute) At the beginning of the film, the letters BSAA are visible next to the military Hummer that Alice (Milla Jovovich) is riding in. This is the abbreviation of the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance, the name of the anti-bioterrorism task force introduced in the game Resident Evil 5 (2009). The organization was founded after Umbrella's fall by several survivors of the Raccoon City incident, including Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, because of their recent experience in fighting bioweapons.
- #021
While Alice travels to Raccoon City, a brief image of a swinging Rayden head from Mortal Kombat appears on a control panel. Mortal Kombat was director Paul Anderson's first video game film adaptation.
- #022
Milla Jovovich is the only actor to appear in every film in the series.
- #023
This is the first appearance of Dr. James Marcus (Mark Simpson) in the film series. Dr. Marcus is a character taken from the games: in Resident Evil Zero (2002) he is one of the discoverers of the T-Virus who is killed by Albert Wesker, but most of the similarities end there. In the game, Dr. Marcus was a much older American scientist with no children and one of Umbrella's founders. His reasons for inventing the T-Virus were simple vanity and scientific curiosity, and he ruthlessly sacrificed test subjects on the way to his goals. When he no longer served Umbrella's interests, he was eventually killed on the orders of co-founder Ozwell Spencer (a character absent from the films), but was resurrected as an enhanced being because of his own T-Virus. In the film the order was given by Dr. Isaacs, but that character never appeared in the games.
- #024
The title card accompanying Dr. James Marcus references the Arklay Mountains, where the first Resident Evil game is set.
- #025
Wentworth Miller could not reprise the role of Chris Redfield because of scheduling conflicts with the new season of Prison Break (2005). The character appeared in only one film: Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010).
- #026
The makeup process to transform Milla Jovovich into the elderly Alicia Marcus took 4-5 hours to complete.
- #027
Unlike the previous film, Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), which had the series' highest budget at 65 million dollars, this film holds the second-lowest budget record at 40 million dollars; a reduced budget probably because the previous film's box office gross was lower than that of Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010). The first film's budget was only 33 million dollars.
- #028
Aryana Engineer could not play Becky again because she had outgrown the role and no longer looked the same age after production began. Rather than being recast, Becky was written out of the film.
- #029
Korean actor Lee Joon-gi, popular in his home country, makes his first feature film in America with this film, in which he plays Commander Lee of the Umbrella Corporation.
- #030
Busani "Alisdair" Ncube, a man from Zimbabwe, traveled more than 1,600 miles for the chance to appear as an extra in the film, but ran out of money along the way.
- #031
The film received the best Rotten Tomatoes score of the Resident Evil series and the series' highest box office gross, until Resident Evil (2026), the first Resident Evil film to earn a "fresh" rating on the site.
- #032
An Alice in Wonderland reference (aside from the Red Queen and the main character's name): the Jabberwocky at the beginning of the film is based on John Tenniel's illustration for Through the Looking-Glass.
- #033
The last day of shooting took place on 10 December 2015 in Belhar, South Africa.
- #034
With this film, the Resident Evil series' global box office revenue surpassed 1 billion dollars. It was the second horror series to gross 1 billion dollars worldwide, after Alien.
- #035
The film was released on 27 January 2017, three days after the premiere of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2017), the new installment of the video game series.
- #036
At 106 minutes, it is the longest film in the series. The second longest is the first film at 100 minutes.
- #037
The film was released almost 15 years after the first Resident Evil (2002) film.
- #038
The large winged creature that attacks Alice as she leaves Washington is the Kipepeo, a bioweapon introduced in Resident Evil 5 (2009), though in that game it is a Plagas mutant rather than a product of the T-Virus.
- #039
Because of Milla Jovovich's pregnancy, this film had the longest wait between premieres of any installment in the series, with four years separating Resident Evil: Retribution (2012) and this chapter. All previous installments had been released two to three years apart.
- #040
It is the first film in the series to feature no songs.
- #041
It is the first Resident Evil film since the original Resident Evil (2002) not to open at number one in domestic box office revenue. It placed fourth behind Split (2016), A Dog's Purpose (2017) and Hidden Figures (2016). Less than 10% of its worldwide gross was earned in the United States and Canada.
- #042
Unlike Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) and Resident Evil: Retribution (2012), director Paul W. S. Anderson did not shoot the film in 3D, and it was converted afterward instead.
- #043
When Claire is trapped in the glass cell, she uses a lighter to ignite the fuse. Lighters are an important tool in many Resident Evil games.
- #044
The watch Alice wears in the film is actually a fitness tracker, the Garmin Vivofit.
- #045
The large humanoid creature that fights Alice in the Hive and kills Razor is a Bloodshot from the game Resident Evil 6 (2012).
- #046
It is television presenter Rola's first feature film.
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