// KOTAKU — GAMING
Everything We Know About Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil Movie
Zach Cregger, who’s become widely regarded as one of the breakout directors in modern horror, is helming the next Resident Evil, set to premiere in theaters next month. After Weapons and Barbarian, the guy’s earned some trust with a big horror franchise. But there’s been a bit of concern within the Resident Evil community about his take on Capcom’s beloved series. If you’re curious about the movie, we’re here to break down everything we know so far.
Resident Evil stars Weapons actor Austin Abrams as Bryan, a medical courier set to make an organ delivery into Raccoon City, famously known as the setting of Resident Evil 2’s outbreak. As the trailer reveals, he’s en route to Raccoon City and arguing with his girlfriend over the phone when he accidentally runs over a woman on the snowy road who, despite striding into the roadway, appears to have been dead before she was struck. As Bryan searches for help and a phone he can use, he heads to a seemingly abandoned house, and then faces the horrors of the undead. Just how much of the film takes place in that house, however, or what other developments may occur, we don’t know at this point.
Unless Cregger and co. have been keeping their presence in the movie secret for now, none of the usual Resident Evil characters are set to appear in the film. Cregger said he doesn’t have any interest in simply retelling Resident Evil 2’s story, saying it would be “disappointing” and it’s already been done before.
“I wanted to tell a story that could take place in the Resident Evil world, but wasn’t telling a story that the games had already told,” Cregger said in April. “To me, I would feel like there’s kind of no winning there if I were to tell Leon’s story, because the games do such a great job. It would just be kind of redundant, and ultimately, I think, disappointing.”
Now that we know Resident Evil doesn’t star any of the characters from the video games, fans have been a bit suspicious of the movie’s inconsistencies with the source material. Bryan has a smartphone, while the original Raccoon City story in Resident Evil 2 took place in the ‘90s, and while it’s snowing in the film, it wasn’t snowing in Raccoon City during the game’s version of the outbreak, either. Well, that’s because Cregger says the movie takes place in the modern day and he made it snow because he thought it was cool.
“It takes place in the snow and in 2026,” he says. “That’s why he has an iPhone, because I took liberties to tell a story I wanted to tell and make the movie look the way I wanted it to look. I am not doing exactly a one-for-one Resident Evil 2 adaptation. There are differences between this movie and the game, so I just want to acknowledge that. I don’t think it makes the movie any worse. I think it looks really fucking cool to have a horror movie set in the snow. I don’t see enough of those. I like it a lot. The snow is an aesthetic decision. If the barrier of entry is whether I do a one-for-one port, then I guess, in that regard, I have failed. But I think the movie is stronger for it.”
Yes, which is why the messaging around this movie has gotten a bit messy for Resident Evil diehards over the past few months.
“Basically my rule for this movie was to just try and try and make a movie that felt like my experience of playing the game that could live in the world of Resident Evil,” Cregger told IGN in April. “I feel like this movie takes place alongside the events of Resident Evil 2. I like to think that everything that’s going on in the police station could be happening in this world. This is just another dude on another mission on the other side of town and like what’s going on with him.”
Cregger says he wants the experience of watching the film to feel like being thrust into a Resident Evil game as a normal person rather than a Leon Kennedy–style hero who can do sick backflips and bust out one-liners while blowing the heads off an entire horde of zombies, so you’ll see Bryan looking around for game-ac