Killing Jill Valentine Would Have Saved The Resident Evil Movies (2024)

The Resident Evil movies came very close to killing Jill Valentine, which could have steered the series in the right direction. The reason the first Resident Evil movie from 2002 barely resembles the original game is that director Paul W.S. Anderson was hedging his bets. He was a self-professed fan of Capcom's survival horror franchise, but George A. Romero had already been hired to direct an adaptation. Anderson thus wrote a screenplay called Undead that was heavily based on Resident Evil, planning to pitch it as an original project OR a possible Resident Evil adaptation, if Romero pulled out of the movie.

The latter is how events worked out, with Anderson directing the original film, in addition to parts four to six. That's partly why the Resident Evil movies and video games bear little resemblance to one another. Major characters like Chris and Claire Redfield or Ada Wong still appeared, but they were very much supporting figures to Milla Jovovich's Alice. In later sequels, it felt like creative restraints on what could or couldn't be done with the IP influenced how those characters could be used, with many of them vanishing with no explanation. However, the planned fate of Sienna Guillory's Jill Valentine may have changed that.

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Jill Valentine Was Meant To Die In Resident Evil: Extinction

None of the films received critical raves, but it feels like the third entry Resident Evil: Extinction is commonly agreed to be the best. It has arguably the least in common with the games, instead being a Mad Max-inspired zombie apocalypse adventure. It also introduced Ali Larter's Claire Redfield to the films, though she had little in common with her game counterpart. However, Claire was a replacement for Guillory's Jill, who in the original screenplay led the caravan of survivors alongside The Mummy star Oded Fehr's Carlos. Jill had a juicy role too, ending with her being bitten by an infected Carlos and sacrificing herself to save the other survivors.

Guillory had to drop out, with her scheduled for fantasy blockbuster Eragon making her unable to commit. Resident Evil: Extinction was rewritten, giving most of Jill's scenes to Claire and her death scene to Carlos instead. Jill's demise could have marked a turning point for the movies, as instead of the one-dimensional figure seen in Apocalypse, she would have been given a more fleshed-out role. Plus, few fans would have expected her to die given her prominence in Capcom's saga. Guillory's departure obviously played a big part in why those plans were scrapped, but it had a ripple effect on later movies.

The fifth entry Retribution - which brought back Michelle Rodriguez - stuffed lots of game characters into the story, and appeared to be setting up an epic finale. However, cut to the opening of The Final Chapter, they all vanished. In a 2017 Collider chat, Jovovich revealed "...we need a body count and it’s important that we have people that are going to die, and I am not going to die and you know characters from the game can’t die because they are owned by Capcom and we’re not allowed to kill any of them off." Had Jill died in Extinction, this could have changed the series for the better.

As Jovovich stated, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter needed characters to perish, and it would have been an epic finale to have the likes of Chris, Leon Kennedy, Ada, etc working with Alice. Instead, they're all replaced with poorly developed cannon fodder in the final movie. Since this Capcom restriction about killing major game figures seemingly didn't exist when Extinction was being developed, Jill's death could have convinced the publisher the film series could be its own, distinct thing. Alas, that's not the way it worked out, though The Final Chapter's novelization at least had the sense to slaughter them all in the opening chapters to explain what happened.

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