Zach Cregger’s take on Capcom’s survival horror franchise looks wildly different
The new Resident Evil movie from Weapons and Barbarian director Zach Cregger finally has its first trailer. The acclaimed horror movie director’s take on Capcom’s survival horror franchise is quite different from the previous seven live-action films and the short-lived Netflix TV series based on Resident Evil, Sony Pictures’ first look reveals.
That’s unsurprising: Cregger has long been vocal about not directly adapting the Resident Evil game stories, saying that his movie is an original story that “takes place in the world of the games.”
“[T]he journey you’ll have as a viewer of watching this movie is going to be similar to the journey you have as a player when you play these games,” Cregger said in an interview last year. “And what that means is it follows one protagonist from point A to point B as they just descend deeper and deeper and deeper into Hell.” Cregger says that his Resident Evil movie “feels inline with my sensibility, has my sense of tone, and it’s just a much bigger scale than Weapons and certainly Barbarian.”
Sony Pictures has produced a broad range of films based on Resident Evil over the past two decades, including six with filmmaker Paul W. S. Anderson and star Milla Jovovich. After 2016’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Sony attempted to reboot the franchise with a back-to-basics approach with Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which adapted elements of the first two video games. Welcome to Raccoon City was a critical and commercial misfire, leading Sony and Constantin Films to whip up another reboot with Cregger at the helm.
Resident Evil stars Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Paul Walter Hauser, and Kali Reis. Cregger directs from a script co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, Army of the Dead). The movie opens on Sept. 18, and will be released in IMAX.