Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot cut almost every joke and won over critics

Resident Evil, the new take on Capcom’s survival-horror games from Zach Cregger, the director of Barbarian and Weapons, opened in the United States on 18 September. Sony Pictures is distributing it, with Constantin Film, which holds the adaptation rights, and PlayStation Productions producing. Japan gets it on 9 October.

Cregger did not adapt any single game and brought in none of the familiar characters. “I’m not going to tell Leon’s story, because Leon’s story is told in the games,” he said. He calls the film a “love letter to the games” and compares it not to the earlier movies but to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II.

What the film is about

Bryan is a medical courier who drives deliveries between hospitals. On a winter night he is taking a package to Raccoon City General Hospital in the snowy Colorado mountains when he hits a pedestrian on the road. Soon he learns that the town is in the grip of a viral outbreak that turns the infected into monsters, and he has to fight his way to the hospital laboratory and get his cargo to scientists working on a cure.

The story runs alongside the events of Resident Evil 2 — the same night Raccoon City falls, but moved to the present day. Cregger says he wanted a story “on the periphery” of that night that captures the pacing and mood players know. Besides the second game, he drew on Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and Resident Evil 4.

The cast

• Austin Abrams — Bryan
• Paul Walter Hauser — Paul, an Umbrella scientist
• Zach Cherry — Carl, an Umbrella scientist
• Kali Reis — Maxine, an Umbrella enforcer
• Will Merrick and Griffin Newman — scientists Dave and Wade
• Emily Piggford — Dr Maria Stokes
• Sara Paxton — the voice of Michelle, Bryan’s girlfriend

Cregger chose Abrams while shooting Weapons, in which the actor had a small part, and never considered anyone else: watching the scene where Abrams’s character breaks into a house, he says, “everything he was doing was what I needed from my lead.” Maxine was first written as a man before going to a former world boxing champion. Cregger himself is in the credits too — he voices the intercom.

Behind the camera

Four major studios, Warner Bros. and Netflix among them, bid for the distribution rights; Sony won in March 2025. Cregger wrote the script with Shay Hatten, a co-writer of John Wick: Chapter 4, and admitted he had never watched any of the earlier Resident Evil films.

Filming took place in Prague from 10 October 2025 to 22 January 2026. The cinematographer is Dariusz Wolski, who shot Pirates of the Caribbean and The Martian. The score comes from the Holladay brothers, Hays and Ryan, who also worked with Cregger on Weapons. In the tensest scenes the director dropped the music entirely: “When you’re not holding their hand, they feel like anything could happen.”

The most surprising story is about test screenings. “People really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny,” Cregger told The Hollywood Reporter. He stripped out as many jokes as he could, and audiences liked the film more. So did he: “There’s not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss. A little bit of humour goes a long way in a horror movie.”

The budget was around $75 million, and the film runs 94 minutes.

Reviews and box office

Critics have ranked it above every other video game adaptation: 96% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and a Metacritic score of 79, ahead of the previous leader, Exit 8. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B+, the best grade in the franchise.

William Bibbiani of TheWrap called it Cregger’s best film to date, and Clarisse Loughrey of The Independent described a “funny, delirious” reboot that feels like playing the game. Jesse Hassenger of The Guardian called it “a wild rollercoaster ride” and singled out Abrams. Not everyone was won over: Jocelyn Noveck of the Associated Press found the ever-bigger action tiring by the end, and Phil de Semlyen of Time Out gave it three stars out of five, finding it more “goofy and good-looking” than scary.

The box office followed the reviews. Forecasts put the US opening at $40–50 million; the film took $60 million there and $108.3 million worldwide, a record both for the franchise, beating Resident Evil: Retribution, and for Cregger. By 27 September it had grossed $197 million. The director is already hinting at more: “I’ve got ideas” about where the story could go next.

See the full cast, crew and stills on the film’s page in our AMDB database.