How's the new "Resident Evil"? After "Weapons," Zach Cregger Has Dived Into the World of Video Games

In 2025 it was Weapons, now it's Resident Evil. A curious career trajectory for Zach Cregger, launched in 2022 by the horror film Barbarian and already arriving at a franchise on his third solo feature as writer and director. The lure of money is, after all, irresistible — but taking charge of a video game property first brought to the screen in 2002 and in need of reinvention can also be a genuine challenge for a filmmaker. A test of one's abilities, a chance to prove you can bend a classic to your own will, merging the demands of an industry that bets on sure things with the boldness of a creative who can let his own ambitions run free.

And so Cregger steps into a project that had been delayed multiple times by Constantin Film, which holds the cinematic rights to the franchise, licensed from Japanese company Capcom. Following the failure of the 2021 film Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, an attempt was made to relaunch the brand with a Netflix series that never got off the ground. In early 2025, the American director was brought on board to deliver the second attempted reboot of Resident Evil (before the release of Weapons), positioning it midway between a story running parallel to the events of the 1998 video game Resident Evil 2 — though set in the modern day — and a completely new narrative with an original plot and original characters. His Resident Evil (no sequential numbers or subtitles) thus becomes, in effect, the eighth film in the cinematic landscape opened in the early 2000s by P. W. Anderson, a film that competes in a field now well known to fans of both the video game and the horror genre, while bringing with it unexpected and surprising elements.

How Zach Cregger reinvented Resident Evil

To build the film, Cregger had an instinct that — as tends to happen these days with franchises looking to expand — seems to be the most fitting approach for survival. The filmmaker dives into a familiar universe that, while globally beloved, is not always a guaranteed draw, and so plays it smart, devising a way to take the recognisable container and fill it with original solutions and inventive ideas that step somewhat outside the rigid constraints of faithfulness to the source material.

Obviously, being fresh, creative and authentic is the goal of every project — yet not all of them manage to reach even a respectable standard every time. Too often there is indecision about which path to take: whether to remain entirely faithful to the reference material or, alternatively, to break free and wander into entirely different territory. Productions that, in their reliance on the tried and tested, shy away from artistic visions that would then need to be backed by adequate budgets — so as not to give the impression of having mistakenly aimed for some B-movie cult oddity, as with the aforementioned Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Quality demands quality, and that is what Zach Cregger has delivered, drawing on specific references to the video game while allowing himself to be carried along by a self-contained, tangential story that stands apart from everything already known about Resident Evil.

What is the new Resident Evil about?

In the film, Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier who must make an urgent delivery to Raccoon General Hospital. Weather conditions are far from ideal, but it won't be the snow that soon throws him off course. Inexplicable strange occurrences are turning people — and dogs — into monsters. The young man, however, has a purpose, and he intends to see it through.

In the (mis)adventure he puts his protagonist through, Zach Cregger ensures that cinematic experience and video game references collide, fully satisfying fans of the franchise while simultaneously entertaining audiences as they watch an explosion of irony and horror unfold on the big screen, keeping viewers thoroughly engaged. The character of Bryan — played by the capable Austin Abrams, whom the director carries over from Weapons — is the ideal player: sharp enough to look after himself through the night of terror he finds himself living, yet equally unprepared in ways that produce deliberately amusing moments of awkwardness that endear him to the audience. And at times, just like a game piece, he is moved in ways that offer the viewer a video game point of view: there are first-person shots, there is gunfire aimed at monstrous creatures, there are rifle barrels jutting into frame as though held by whoever is sitting in the cinema seat.

Resident Evil between video game, horror and cinema

The direction at times defers to the video game, and the video game serves as a foundation upon which the story can transform and become as cinematic as possible. Cregger also plays at echoing himself, with characters and their frantic runs that now strongly call to mind Weapons and express the fusion between the franchise's identity and that of the filmmaker entrusted with the film. A crossroads of references and settings that will delight fans, and a story that knows full well that cinema is now the space in which to give everything. A blockbuster that draws Zach Cregger even deeper into the horror imagination, while we await his future work — which, regardless of how Resident Evil performs and just as with Barbarian and Weapons, one hopes will be based on original material.