We Saw The First 20 Minutes Of Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, And It Might Be The Funniest And Scariest Movie In The Franchise

"Resident Evil" holds a place in history as one of the preeminent survival horror video games, yet the franchise has been surprisingly malleable throughout its 30-year existence. Encapsulating not just a large variety of characters, storylines, locations, and creatures, but also divergent continuities and creative approaches, too. When it comes to live-action "Resident Evil" adaptations, you have several flavors to choose from. There's the action-heavy Paul WS Anderson-directed (and/or written) series. There's the more horror-focused and game canon-faithful movie "Welcome to Raccoon City." Then there's the short-lived eponymous TV series, which took its own set of wild creative swings. As a result, it's tricky to nail down what a quintessential "Resident Evil" movie or show even is.

Leave it to filmmaker Zach Cregger to waltz into the fray with a solution so simple, it's scary. The writer-director has only two horror movies under his belt so far, but they happen to be the intimidating likes of "Barbarian" and "Weapons," films which have impacted the genre so much that the latter won an Academy Award. With those two movies, Cregger has built a reputation for himself as a subversive with regard to narrative and structure, so it wouldn't have been a surprise to see him take "Resident Evil" in an even crazier direction. Instead, Cregger's subversion this time around is bringing the series back to basics, making a 95-minute movie centered tightly around a new character's story that fits in the series' lore. 

I recently got to see the opening 20 minutes of Cregger's "Resident Evil," and if that footage is anything to go by, this movie may be the scariest and funniest film in the series, and something that could possibly please longtime fans and newcomers equally.

The new "Resident Evil" movie is primarily focused on a single character — a fairly notable departure for the franchise — but not new for Zach Cregger. Cregger's preferred narrative structure follows one person at a time, as seen in "Weapons," which was broken up into several character-centric segments. One of those segments followed a homeless drug addict played by Austin Abrams, and it was a highlight of the film thanks to Abrams' idiosyncratic characterization. "Resident Evil" follows Bryan, a medical courier who is also played by Abrams, which means that the film is Abrams' "Weapons" segment writ large, in a way.

Judging by the opening scenes I got to see, Abrams is more than up to the task of carrying an entire movie on his shoulders, as he makes Bryan as endearing as he is average and bumbling. Sure, his ordinary nature makes him a far cry from every other protagonist in the "Resident Evil" films, but it's also what lends the movie its fabulous sense of humor and suspense. The film opens with Bryan delivering an organ and dealing with some drama with his girlfriend over the phone when he's unexpectedly offered a high-paying gig to deliver something to a hospital in Raccoon City. From there, it's one mishap after another, as Bryan's bad luck has him encountering a zombie on a remote road where things get deadly fast. 

All the while, it's a delight to see what Bryan does next, whether he makes a smart choice or screws things up even further. That's a sweet spot for both Abrams and Cregger, who seem to be cementing a fantastic new actor-director double act here. Both men can sell a punchline as well as a jump scare.

The possibility of "Resident Evil" satisfying every fan of the series is admittedly pretty slim, especially considering how fussy that fandom has been. However, Zach Cregger's clear love for the series and its lore might win them over. While the footage I saw only contained one major reference to the games, it seems likely that the rest of the movie might have a lot more connections to the series. It would probably be foolish to expect any major new twists or revelations where the "Resident Evil" canon is concerned, especially since Cregger has stated that this film is set concurrently with the initial outbreak of the T-Virus, but you never know. It's clearly set in the present day, so I don't know if this means that a present-day version of the events of the first few games are happening off-screen, or what. We shall see!

What I feel much more confident in saying is that "Resident Evil" has the potential to revolutionize video game adaptations. Right now, many video game movies and shows are too beholden to the fans' demands to make them exactly like the games they come from. By contrast, Cregger's "Resident Evil" seeks to adapt the feeling of the unique experience of the game, rather than a particular character or storyline. While this approach wouldn't work for every video game, it could work for a majority of them, and thus would be a wonderful way to extend the experience of the games without lazily regurgitating them. Amongst all the scares and fun that "Resident Evil" seems to promise, raising the bar for the video game movie could be Cregger's latest and neatest trick.

"Resident Evil" is in theaters on September 18th, 2026.