Why Jensen Ackles' Perfect Resident Evil Casting Never Worked Out
Jensen Ackles was linked to the role of Leon Kennedy in Milla Jovovich's Resident Evil movies a few times, but here's why this perfect casting never worked out. In adapting the original Resident Evil game, writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson took the unusual step of basically ignoring the source material in favor of creating an original story that borrowed plot elements and monsters from the series. He patterned the basic storyline after Alice In Wonderland, with Milla Jovovich's Alice leading a group of survivors through an underground lab infested with zombies and other threats.
The 2002 movie didn't receive good reviews, but it was a solid success, and later Resident Evil movies would pull further and further away from the video games. This upset longtime followers of the games who longed for a more accurate, horror-focused entry, but the huge success of the Jovovich-fronted films overseas made that switch unlikely. The Alice saga came to a close with 2017's Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, which (for now, at least) completed the character's journey.
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Devotees of Resident Evil weren't particularly happy with how the movies depicted characters from the games either. Key heroes like Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine or Claire Redfield were often treated as mere supporting players to Alice and had little in common with their video game counterparts. Leon Kennedy is one of the franchise's most famous protagonists, and finally appeared in the fifth entry Resident Evil: Retribution — which also brought back Michelle Rodriguez's Rain — in 2012. Johann Urb played the part, but Supernatural's Jensen Ackles was up for Leon, not once, not twice, but
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