Resident Evil 2021’s Timeline Explained: When It Takes Place

The new Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City trailer has given a better idea of when the film is set to take place and how the narrative’s timeline might relate to the original games. Coming from director Johannes Roberts, the film is intended to be an adaptation that focuses on horror and is true to the spirit of the video game franchise. The film will have no connection to the previous Resident Evil movies that were fronted by Milla Jovovich.

The story for the Resident Evil movie reboot is said to be an adaptation of the first two games combined into a single movie. Resident Evil 1 sees the S.T.A.R.S. Alpha team investigating the Spencer Mansion on the outskirts of Raccoon City after the Bravo team goes missing while looking into a series of unexplained deaths. The mansion is discovered to be a front for a secret laboratory run by the Umbrella corporation. Resident Evil 2 takes place several months later in Raccoon City itself and follows the fallout of some of the events from the first game and an outbreak of the T-virus throughout the city.

When the premise for the movie was first announced, it was unclear how Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City would adapt two stories that took place months apart. Theories suggested that the timeline could be drastically changed, or the plot of the first game might be told within flashbacks. Resident Evil 1 took place on July 24, 1998, and Resident Evil 2 took place on September 29, 1998. The introduction to the Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City trailer clarifies with a timestamp that all of the events for the new movie will take place on September 30, 1998.

This means that Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is set to take place on the day after the original date of Claire Redfield and Leon S. Kennedy’s experiences in Raccoon City from Resident Evil 2. This date might have been selected to indicate that all of the events are happening after the outbreak of the T-virus has been established throughout the area. In turn, this will mean that all of the heroes’ efforts working towards fixing the problem and exposing the Umbrella Corporations hand in it all.

While this change won’t necessitate a huge change to Claire and Leon’s storyline from Resident Evil 2, moving the timeline for the S.T.A.R.S. Alpha team’s exploits to after the breakout will change the context of much of that storyline. If, as the trailer suggests, the new plot has Claire Redfield pressure her brother, Chris, to take the Alpha team and investigate the Spencer Mansion, then the outbreak is presumably already underway and the team would already know about the actions of the infected. However, the timeline for 2021’s Resident Evil movie still remains somewhat unclear as the S.T.A.R.S. seem surprised to come across a zombie in the Spencer Mansion.

It would of course have been possible to update the series to have it set in the present day. However, a lot of the essence of the original aesthetic is tied to the late 1990s and some developments in technology would create difficulties for the plot. Keeping the events of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon Cityset in 1998 will help the creators to maintain more of the spirit of the original video games.

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Faefyx Collington
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Faefyx Collington (They/Them) is a senior features writer for Screen Rant. They’re a British writer of both fiction and non-fiction, focussing on science fiction, fantasy, and mystery for the former and on culture, gender, and current affairs for the latter.
Never content to settle to one thing, Faefyx is also a co-host and producer of the podcast and video series “Unramblings,” and can occasionally be found making music around the internet as well.
Having acquired degrees on both sides of the Atlantic, Fyx has settled (for the moment) in the southern United States where they live with their spouse and an entirely appropriate number of cats.

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