We just got our first teaser on Zach Creggar’s Resident Evil, and it’s looking to be another wildly unpredictable, yet highly entertaining experience.
Right off of two massive hits in Barbarian and Weapons, Zach Creggar has earned an indomitable reputation across horror fans. Unfortunately, Creggar’s new film has a new, far more difficult community to appease: the Resident Evil fandom.
The Immediate Differences
Nearly every interview with Zach Creggar regarding the film’s loose canonicity has brought concerns from the fans. From what we’ve heard so far, Resident Evil (2026) is an entirely original story set or loosely set surrounding the 1998 city-wide viral outbreak in Resident Evil 2.
The teaser has confirmed that the creative liberties are more dramatic than expected. There are no franchise staple enemies or hints of legacy characters to be seen. Instead, we focus on a new main character taking on unrecognizable, deformed horrors in a drastically dissimilar, modern-day city that is only called Raccoon City by name.
Fandom discourse has been very mixed on the trailer, some welcoming a fresh take with a trusted director, and others being severely disappointed to have another highly inaccurate movie right off the coattails of the reviled Welcome to Raccoon City movie 4 years ago. Many of these opinions are informed by the fact that, while none of the Resident Evil movies have been critical failures, none have truly won over fans. Let alone serving as good horror films.
Victim of a Multi-Million Success
Resident Evil is currently one of the most profitable video game franchises ever made, now on its 30th anniversary. A large part of this success is the series’s constant knack for reinvention: being an intimate survival horror title in one era or a military/siege character action game in another. Sometimes, even both, with the recent Resident Evil: Requiem making a flawed but highly effective blend of these tones into one cohesive experience.
However, while a great tool for avoiding genre stagnation, it is an entirely different story for a massive fanbase with different ideas of brand identity in mind. Doubly so for adaptations that not only have to commit to just one genre or game, but also need to take creative liberties for a completely different medium. And oh god, which character are we going to choose or leave out this time?
It’s not as simple as not being able to please everyone. Artistically, what is the function of remaking a game’s story in a format that it was never meant for? Better yet, why would you want to faithfully adapt that story into a shorter, less immersive timeframe when the game that already accomplished that story already exists?
The Problem With Every Resident Evil Movie
This problem has been present in every Resident Evil film so far.
The Paul W.S. Anderson film series was prime trashy entertainment, adapting the cheesy military action tone of the 2000s at the cost of wild character and lore deviations and a comically unserious narrative.
The Resident Evil CGI film series is more fan appeasing, featuring the game’s cast in action set pieces using the established canon at the cost of all feeling too safe due to the restrictions of that canon.
Return to Raccoon City is… well, not a good time at all, but a large part of its issues came from trying to cram a jarring amount of source material into one 90-minute film with an impossibly low budget.
While none of these films have been commercial failures, there is a common criminal issue with all of them so far: none of them feels like the games. None of them is scary. None of them feature a convincingly unwinnable conflict that is won through a character that progressively upgrades themselves to overcome that threat.
And it’s this exact drama that Zach Creggar’s take on Resident Evil appears to finally be interested in.
Why I Love What We’ve Seen
Fifty seconds into the teaser, the film’s lead (Austin Abrams) makes a mad dash to a shack, seemingly on the run from a looming threat, then scavenges whatever he can find inside. We cut to a close-up of a double-barreled shotgun with two slots, completely empty. He looks worried. I smile.
If that isn’t pure Resident Evil, I don’t know what else is. Creggar’s enthusiastic IGN trailer breakdown only developed my confidence further.
“Whenever you get the new weapon, you think, ‘Thank God. Thank ****ing God.”
“There is something that pursues him throughout the movie… I’m really excited for how this specific creature changes and evolves over the course of the film.”
“If you’ve ever played one of these games, you know you have a locked door, you don’t have what you need to get to the other side, and you have to go through hell to get the key to get out of here… “What is with all these padlocks, man?!”
It doesn’t suck to me that we’re losing out on a competently-made Raccoon City and iconic bioweapons for the big screen, because they’re too familiar to grant us the same fear we had of them the first time. The set pieces in the teaser, on the other hand, from the morbidly obese Tyrant just around the corner to a rain of bodies exploding onto the pavement, are truly alien to the general public and fans alike. It is so much more interesting than having another zombie action flick in 2026.
Overall Expectations
It is rare to see a big director talk about stripping down an IP to its core potential in the way Creggar has. For all the game adaptations I’ve seen in the last decade that have gradually become better at accurately summarizing the plot of their source material, very rarely have these films exactly captured the emotions I felt playing the source material. All I get is a safe, but fun familiarity from them.
And if Creggar can pull this off, I might finally be surprised by one.
Zach Creggar’s Resident Evil will be released in theaters on September 18, 2026.
Leave a Reply