Resident Evil returns to theaters on Friday 18 September, two weeks from now. This is the second attempt at rebooting Capcom's survival horror franchise for the screen, following the Milla Jovovich series and the 2021 Welcome to Raccoon City film, and it arrives with an entirely new setting, cast and creative team.
The story follows Bryan, a medical courier played by Austin Abrams, who takes an out-of-the-way delivery to Raccoon City's hospital and finds the whole city collapsing into a viral outbreak around him over the course of one night. Zach Cherry and Paul Walter Hauser play scientists at the Umbrella corporation whose work sits behind the disaster, and the film runs alongside the timeframe of the Resident Evil 2 game without adapting its plot beat for beat.
The bigger draw is who made it. Zach Cregger, who broke through with Barbarian and followed it with last year's Weapons, directs from a script he wrote with Shay Hatten, a writer on several John Wick films. Cregger pitched an original story set at the edge of the games' events rather than signing on to an existing script, and despite being a lifelong player of the games, he had never sat through a Resident Evil film before making one. He has pointed to Evil Dead II rather than his own earlier work as the closest reference, which suggests a single escalating night built around a courier with no combat skills, closer to a chase than a shooting gallery.
What's confirmed is the setting, the cast, the Cregger and Hatten script, and a Fantastic Fest premiere the night before release. Test screenings over the summer sent Cregger back to the edit to trim jokes that audiences found too plentiful, a sign the film is being tuned for dread first. The wider picture will not be clear until it opens to everyone on the eighteenth.
