'Resident Evil: The Final Chapter': Was Alice Always Intended To Be The Clone?

Note: This post contains spoilers for Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.

After the last Resident Evil movie finally brought an end to the franchise, we were left with a big revelation — one that no one saw coming. The finale of #ResidentEvilTheFinalChapter concluded with the discovery that Alice is a clone. There'd been Alice clones before, but most of us were under the impression that the Alice introduced in the first movie was the original. As it turns out, that Alice was a clone of Alicia Marcus, the daughter of Dr. James Marcus, founder of the Umbrella Corporation.

Dr. James Marcus was a virologist who created the T-virus responsible for the zombie epidemic in the #ResidentEvil cinematic universe. His daughter Alicia was the first successful test subject, who was experimented on in a bid to stop her rare genetic disorder, before being cloned. Her clone was given the alias Alice — this is the Alice we assumed to be the one and only in the first three Resident Evil movies.

Didn't the first three films imply Alice was always the original?

The story of the first two movies tells us that the Umbrella Corporation had captured Alice, experimented on her, and concluded that she was the ideal candidate to bond with the T-virus. This suggested to the audience that her body was one of a kind. Umbrella continued to pursue Alice in the third movie Resident Evil: Extinction, in which Dr. Alexander Isaacs said on multiple occasions that he needed a blood sample of the original Alice to create a successful clone — the Alice from the first two movies, not Alicia Marcus.

Seeing as how Alice had appeared to be the original version of herself rather than a clone in the first three Resident Evil movies, it's possible that the revelations in The Final Chapter might have been retconned for for the last movie.