Where does Resident Evil Welcome to Racoon city fit in the timeline?

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a franchise reboot from director Johannes Roberts, has a clear aim of providing fanservice to longtime players of the hit video game series published by Capcom. The film borrows heavily from the original video games by Capcom, especially Resident Evil (1996) and Resident Evil 2(1998). One particular character also originates from Resident Evil (2002), a remake of the original game that first appeared exclusively on the Nintendo Gamecube.

Welcome to Raccoon City's backdrop and timeline are heavily reminiscent of events and locations from the games, but don't follow the events beat-for-beat. Instead, the film borrows significant events from the first two games chronologically but places them on a concurrent timeline, allowing the Mansion Incident of the original Resident Evil to play out at the same time as the Raccoon City Outbreak of Resident Evil 2 and 3.

Image via Sony Pictures

The film's narrative shifts between S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team as they investigate the lost contact of Bravo Team at the Spencer Mansion, and Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) and Leon S. Kennedy's (Avan Jogia) view of the unraveling situation in Raccoon City and its police station. These events occur simultaneously over the course of a single night, although in the video games they were separate incidents that occurred months apart within the official game timeline. However, given the rapid nature of the spread of the deadly T-Virus in the games, it's a feasible move to bring the two major events together in the interest of telling a story that fits within a film's runtime. Fans of the games will recognize key moments, such as the doomed long-haul trucker crashing his tanker right in front of the Raccoon City police station and the S.T.A.R.S. helicopter being brought down in the woods outside of town, but they've been shuffled around into a slightly new order of events that better serves the film's merged storylines. Much of the backstory and subplots of the original trilogy of video games have also been condensed and shifted around to coincide with the events that are depicted in the movie, such the story of the tragic Lisa Trevor, a fan-favorite enemy from the games.

Welcome to Raccoon City takes place in the year 1998, just like the original trilogy of video games. This stands in fairly stark contrast to the Resident Evil titles headed by Paul W.S. Anderson, which all took place in a contemporary setting full of cutting edge technology. In the first of those films, artificial intelligence and body-slicing laser traps are featured, making it clear that Anderson's take on the game franchise was more of a "near future" take than the source material it was adapting. Keeping in line with the year, Welcome to Raccoon City keeps its universe grounded in the late 90s. Consequently, none of the working class characters in the film have a cell phone, and the internet is essentially nonexistent, which adds to Raccoon City's isolation.

Image via Sony Pictures

Where Capcom created a short gap between the two most major incidents in the early Resident Evil timeline, Welcome to Raccoon City brings all of the survival horror danger together to culminate in one terrible night in 1998. You have to feel for the film's characters, who experience two games' worth of hell breaking loose over the course of an especially bad 12 hours. That's "wrong place, wrong time" taken to the extreme.

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 Evilmovies 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 Citywould 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.

Next: Resident Evil Welcome To Raccoon City Trailer Breakdown: 20 Story Reveals