Resident Evil reaches theaters in one week, on Friday 18 September, with a premiere at Fantastic Fest the night before. It is the second attempt at rebooting the long running video game franchise on screen, and the first to have nothing to do with the six film series that starred Milla Jovovich.
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier making a delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital on the night a viral outbreak turns the city into a slaughterhouse of infected attackers. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser play employees of the pharmaceutical company Umbrella, caught up in containing the same disaster from another side of the city. Zach Cregger directs from a script he wrote with Shay Hatten.
Cregger has been clear that this is not an adaptation of an existing storyline. He has said he will not be telling Leon Kennedy's story, because that story already exists in the games, and has framed the project instead as his own tribute to what it feels like to actually play through one of the Resident Evil titles. That is why Bryan is an invented character with no training and no idea what is happening, dropped into an outbreak that runs parallel to the events of Resident Evil 2, rather than a series regular players already know.
It is a reasonable bet given who is directing. Barbarian and Weapons both built Cregger's reputation on tonal control, the ability to swing between dread and sudden, ugly comedy without losing either. The first trailer shows the same instincts, funny and unsettling in close succession, an encouraging sign that his sensibility survives the move into a bigger, studio backed adaptation.
PlayStation Productions and Constantin Film are behind the film, with Sony distributing, and Cregger came on to write and direct in early 2025. What is still unknown a week out is how it plays for longtime fans of the games once reviews land, and whether this version of Raccoon City is built to support more than one story.
