Resident Evil receives a trailer that references game elements. Perhaps, this will quiet down the fans who said the initial glimpses of the movie were too great a departure from the games.
Fortunately, they have the hyper-faithful Milla Jovovich films to fall back on, if needed…
Resident Evil
It looks like the movie will take the direction of dropping an NPC in the middle of a Resident Evil game. Not a bad idea. It might give the proceedings a fresh angle, rather than following the regular characters of the universe around. That’s gotten pretty tired at this point, as we are already seven (!?) pictures deep into the franchise.
Zach Cregger, who climbed up the ranks via Barbarian and Weapons, is in charge of writing and directing. One of his favorite actors, Austin Abrams, stars in this plot:
In an all-new story, Resident Evil follows Bryan (Abrams), a medical courier who unwittingly finds himself in an action-packed, non-stop race for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in chaos.
Cregger reports he never watched any of the previous Resident Evil movies, and he is basing his take on the second, third and fourth entries of the video game series. Coincidentally, I’ve been playing through some of the Resident Evil games again. It looks like Cregger is borrowing the snowy season from RE: Village. My personal favorite is Resident Evil 4. It is great fun to upgrade the weapons and blast beasties.
Planning for this film began in early 2022, following the failure of Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City and the cancellation of the 2022 Netflix series.
That in itself is somewhat amazing. A movie failed. A series got cancelled. What can we learn from this? Reboot!
The budget is reportedly around $80 million. That is double what Cregger had to work with on Weapons.
The film hits theaters September 18, 2026.
Watch the trailer:
