The Resident Evil film franchise spent nearly two decades chasing diminishing returns, as the six-film saga led by Milla Jovovich eventually became a punchline among horror fans despite crossing $1.2 billion worldwide. Constantin Film then attempted a full reset in 2021 with Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a back-to-basics adaptation that promised a faithful trip through the games but instead earned near-universal scorn from critics and longtime players alike. Zach Cregger, the filmmaker behind Barbarian and the Oscar-winning Weapons, has now inherited the unenviable task of reviving the Capcom property for Sony, opting for an original story rather than another retelling. Early footage from Cregger’s Resident Evil left some fans uneasy that his style might stray too far from the source material, but the newest trailer answers those doubts more directly than anyone expected.
The new trailer opens with Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier assigned to deliver a mysterious organ bag to Raccoon City General Hospital. On the drive over, he strikes a woman with his car, only to discover that she is a zombie. Fleeing the scene, Bryan takes shelter inside a remote cabin, where he finds a typewriter resting on a desk, a shotgun, and the franchise’s signature green box of shells tucked into a drawer. The sequence unfolds with the exact rhythm of a Resident Evil game, dropping an unprepared survivor into a hostile world and forcing him to scavenge for tools just to reach the next room.
The new Resident Evil movie is not based in any game in particular, nor does it feature familiar faces from the franchise. “To try and shoehorn in any of those characters would feel inorganic to this self-contained story,” Cregger previously explained, addressing the absence of franchise icons like Leon S. Kennedy and Jill Valentine. “I have to put the story first and foremost. The concept here is that we’re following an idiot. Not that he’s stupid, but he’s not your typical game character, with no combat skills whatsoever and completely inept at survival.”
Since the original 1996 game, the Resident Evil mythology has grown into an exceptionally dense continuity. The Umbrella Corporation evolved from a local pharmaceutical threat into a global bioterrorism network, while characters such as Chris Redfield, Ada Wong, and Albert Wesker have decades of overlapping history across a dozen mainline titles and countless spinoffs. Folding any of those figures into a two-hour theatrical film would demand substantial exposition just to orient general audiences, while longtime players would likely find that same exposition redundant. Building the story instead around an ordinary courier with no combat training lets Cregger sidestep that structural problem, allowing the film to function as a self-contained survival horror experience. This approach also directly addresses the shortcomings that sank Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, a film that tried to satisfy both new and veteran audiences by cramming in familiar faces and iconic locations, yet left neither group particularly happy.
Resident Evil is scheduled to be released in theaters on September 18th.
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