Over the course of 15 years and six movies, an action horror franchise anchored entirely by actress Milla Jovovich has grossed over a billion dollars at the international box office. The video game adaptation Resident Evil was birthed into an era in which only Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor could be considered bonafide action heroine superstars, survived the dark years of Catwoman and Elektra, and came to a close at a time in which the likes of Rey, Katniss Everdeen and Wonder Woman had become the industry norm. Yet Resident Evil remains largely ignored by anyone outside of its devoted fanbase.

And it’s something that has also plagued Jovovich. A movie mainstay since the early Nineties, she has moonlit as a musician, a muse and a model, worked with auteurs like Spike Lee and Wim Wenders and dominated genres typically unfriendly to female leads.

But she’s still somewhat anonymous as a movie star, beloved by genre fans but unusually overlooked elsewhere. And this week’s reboot of Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy, in which she stars as an evil sorceress facing off against the titular antihero, looks set to not help Jovovich break with career tradition.

That Jovovich remains synonymous with Resident Evil’s Alice, a futuristic corporate stooge cursed with amnesia and evolving into an occasionally superpowered killing machine, may be a part of the problem. The Resident Evil franchise, for as much money as it made, was never regarded as particularly good, even if its assaultive B-movie brainlessness makes many of their entries legitimately fun.