3 min read
Last summer, Zach Cregger achieved auteur status with his smash hit Weapons, a horror film that ended up at the Oscars when Amy Madigan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Now, Cregger is back to raise hell again with Resident Evil, a new screen adaptation of Capcom’s video game franchise. In a huge change of pace from previous Resident Evil movies (of which there are more than you might think), Cregger’s movie looks next to nothing like the games—and this time, that’s a really good thing.
On April 30, Sony released the trailer for Resident Evil, Cregger’s next movie opening on September 18. Austin Abrams leads the film, but he isn’t portraying any known game protagonist like Chris Redfield or Leon Kennedy. Instead, he’s playing Bryan, a medical courier who must fight for his life at a rural farm house overrun with unspeakable terrors. I suspect Cregger has played some of the games but this premise—and a big, bald, bulbous monster that looks a lot like the Fat Molded—makes me believe he’s taking serious notes from Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.
On the surface, Cregger’s movie is unrecognizable from the games. It doesn’t take place in Raccoon City (at least, not entirely), it doesn’t have any mention of Umbrella Corporation, and the absence of the franchise’s popular characters is glaring. But based on the two-minute trailer, Cregger absolutely nails the Resident Evil experience—the tension and panic of scavenging every drawer for shotgun ammo as zombies and other fucked-up things with six limbs stumble your way.
You can watch the trailer below.
The trailer indeed lives up to Cregger’s honest promises that his take is faithful to the franchise’s signature survival-horror experience while telling its own story. In an appearance on The Big Picture from August 2025, Cregger explained the movie “follows a person from point A to point B” in a real-time plot “where you just go deeper and deeper into the depths of hell.”
While Cregger said his film is a “love letter” to the games, the movie can stand on its own. “I just happen to be able to have these Resident Evil people be down,” he said. “I’m doing it because I think this movie is going to be fucking awesome. I consider Resident Evil an original thing, and I think you will too when you see it.”
It’s a compelling thought exercise: What of the many movie adaptations of Resident Evil are actually faithful to Resident Evil? The long-running series under Paul W.S. Anderson, which released six films between 2002 to 2016, certainly included the game’s characters and lore. (Even though they anchored around an original character, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich.) But those movies hardly felt like Resident Evil. They were over-the-top zombie flicks that offered more thrills than chills.
Then there was 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Though made from the ground-up as a more faithful movie adaptation to the games, Welcome to Raccoon City hardly generated any attention and bombed hard during a pandemic box office. And then there’s the CG-animated movies, which look like this. We’ll also ignore the sci-fi heavy 2022 Netflix series that lasted just one season.
Which leads us back to Cregger’s movie. It looks the least like a proper Resident Evil story but is shaping up to feel the most like the games. Leave it to a guy who used to stream his Dark Souls 3 runs on Twitch to get the actual essentials right.
