Last month, Netflix announced that a Resident Evil series was in development for the streaming service, featuring a brand-new original story told across two timelines. Importantly, this was a live-action Western-produced venture into the series centered around Jade and Billie Wesker and New Racoon City. Over the weekend at Tokyo Game Show Online 2020, another Netflix Original series based on the Resident Evil franchise was announced, though this adaptation will be a 3D CG adaptation in the vein of previous CG animated films in the series titled Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness.
Set for a global Netflix release in 2021 and building on the technology used for Resident Evil: Vendetta in 2017, Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness will be produced and supervised by Capcom’s Hiroyuki Kobayashi and animated by TMS Animation and Quebico. Quebico is a newer animation studio founded in 2017 by Kei Miyamoto with a goal of creating 3D animation. The series itself will be a horror-action series based around the stories of Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield.
In the teaser trailer released at Tokyo Game Show Online 2020 and later uploaded by Netflix to their YouTube channel, this trailer sees Claire enters an abandoned building where she then finds something while Leon saves someone in the darkness. What this thing is and who this person is is unknown, and other details on the series are relatively thin on the ground when it comes to story.
While never reaching the success of the Hollywood live action films or the games, the CG animated films based on Resident Evil have a dedicated following among fans of the franchise and are generally well-regarded. Still, this will be the first animated series based on the property, and how they handle this shift to longer-form non-interactive storytelling is unknown.
Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness will premiere exclusively on Netflix worldwide in 2021.