Trivia / Resident Evil: Extinction

• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • By proxy; the idea of Alice wielding kukri knifes came from her choreographer from Resident Evil: Apocalypse, former Mixed Martial Arts fighter Ron Balicki. She had already shown two knifes in Apocalypse's poster, but they were not used in the film proper.
  • Alice's clothing was designed by Milla Jovovich's clothing line, Jovovich-Hawk.
• B-Team Sequel: Paul W.S. Anderson wrote the script, but didn't direct, as he was also working on Death Race.
• California Doubling: The film is set in Nevada but was shot in Mexico and Australia.
• Fake American: Australian Christopher Egan (Mikey), Irish Jason O'Mara (Wesker), and English Matthew Marsden (Slater) play American characters.
• Not Screened for Critics: It wasn't, possibly due to the bad critical reception of the two previous films.
• Refitted for Sequel: The White Queen was considered to appear in the very first film.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Jovovich initially opposed to the idea of making a third Resident Evil film, as the Executive Meddling the team suffered in Apocalypse had soured the franchise for her. She only changed her mind after reading a late Extinction script.
  • Sienna Guillory was approached to return as Jill Valentine, who was originally planned to be the leader of the convoy, but she declined as she was busy doing Eragon. This removed an entire subplot in which Jill would be hostile and distrustful towards Alice due to the latter killing Angie between films while under Umbrella's mind control. Jill would have ended up getting infected by a zombified Carlos and sacrificing herself in the tanker the way Carlos does in the final product.^note The novelization kept the bit about Angie and explained Jill's absence as her leading a bunch of other survivors.
  • Aside from Jill, an initial draft of the script written in 2005 contained many other changes, most notably a companion dog for Alice named Paco, a pack of zombie dogs in the radio station instead of cannibal rednecks and a hoard of zombies around the motel instead of the bird battle (the latter would happen in Las Vegas). As Carlos would get infected in his place, LJ would survive the film's events, venture down into the facility along with Alice and even be the one to activate the laser grid that would dispose of Isaacs, but most of his role would have been played by a character named Sven. Betty would also survive the film and lead the remaining survivors to Alaska while Chase would be absent altogether.
  • When Guillory proved unavailable, Paul W.S. Anderson and producer Jeremy Bolt didn't see fit to recast her yet still wanted a canon character to lead it, so they chose Claire Redfield. The original purpose of Claire and her people's trip to Alaska was to reunite with her brother Chris, just like in the games, but they later decided to replace it with a more generic search for a safe haven and leave Chris for a future film. He ended up appearing in the very next one, Resident Evil: Afterlife.
  • Although Jill got replaced with Claire, the film was still going to reveal Angela Ashford's fate onscreen, this time being that she was killed by Umbrella soldiers after the events of Apocalypse. This was omitted at the end, leaving her fate unknown in film continuity. Another dramatic revelation, namely that Alice Abernathy's real name was Janus (or Janice) Prospero, floated through several stages of the script, but it was ultimately discarded. Similarly, at some point it would have been stated that K-Mart's true name was Elizabeth Jane Case.
  • Wesker was not present in the first script versions. His lines were originally spoken by a Japanese Umbrella commander named Okamoto (a homage to Capcom executive and producer of the two first films Yoshiki Okamoto).
  • The prologue with Alice's clones was a very late addition to the script. In earlier versions, the film started with Alice discovering an abandoned TV station where she would find footage of the T-Virus apocalypse and start her opening monologue. There would have possibly been footage of major cities getting overrun and North American countries trying to contain the spread of the virus by killing the refugees, as well as the images of Umbrella executives convicted for genocide in the International Court of Geneva, only for them to slip away when said building was overrun by zombies. Although all of this was erased, the monologue remained, being relocated after the title card and during a Spreading Disaster Map Graphic, as did the TV station, which was changed to contain the deranged family.
• Working Title: Resident Evil: Afterlife, which was used as the next film's title. It was also shipped to some theaters as simply "Raccoon City."

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