RE Movie Director Stands Firm on Ditching Game Characters

"I don't know what to do about it." That's Zach Cregger's answer to Resident Evil fans who watched the first trailer for his upcoming film and immediately asked where the characters they've spent decades with had gone. No Leon. No Jill. No Chris. Instead, a medical courier named Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, stumbling through the Raccoon City outbreak with no idea how to handle a firearm.

In a conversation with Obsession director Curry Barker for Interview Magazine, Cregger acknowledged the split reaction to the trailer, which dropped last week. "There's so many people that clearly really want the video game, meaning the characters and story from the video game, and anything different than that is really not welcomed," he said. "I didn't realize how passionate some people were about that."

But here's where Cregger draws his line: he doesn't think those fans would actually enjoy what they're asking for. "If I did that I don't think I'd be creatively fulfilled, and I don't even think they would enjoy it. If I just did the story of the games, I think the most diehard fans would be bummed."

I think he's probably right, even if the delivery is a bit blunt. Every attempt to faithfully adapt Resident Evil's game plots to film has ranged from forgettable to actively bad. The Paul W.S. Anderson movies went their own direction and became a guilty-pleasure franchise; the 2021 Welcome to Raccoon City tried to be the faithful adaptation fans asked for and was met with a collective shrug. The games' stories work because you're the one solving the puzzles and rationing ammo. Strip that interactivity away and you're left with B-movie dialogue and plot twists that only land when you've spent twelve hours earning them. Cregger seems to understand this, and his track record with Barbarian and Weapons suggests he knows how to build dread without leaning on someone else's blueprint.

Spirit Over Script

What Cregger is chasing instead is the feeling of a Resident Evil game, not its plot beats. In a separate sneak peek shared on the official Resident Evil channels, he described his approach: "I had this idea for a story in the world of Resident Evil, but it's kind of like me, if I was dropped into a Resident Evil game. I'm terrible with guns; I wouldn't know how any of them work, and I would miss 99% of all of my shots."

This is actually one of the smartest things the recent Resident Evil games have done well. The remakes of RE2 and RE3, and especially RE7 and Village, succeeded because they made you feel underprepared and overwhelmed. Ethan Winters wasn't a trained operative; he was a regular person in an impossible situation. Cregger is borrowing that same energy for a film protagonist, and it's a better foundation for a movie than trying to recreate Leon's roundhouse kicks in live action. He's reportedly spent thousands of hours with the games, and his pitch reflects someone who internalized the tension rather than just the lore.

The cast beyond Abrams includes Paul Walter Hauser as Carl and Kali Reis as Pauline, with Zach Cherry also appearing. None of these are established Resident Evil characters. The story runs parallel to the events of the second game but tells its own self-contained narrative during the outbreak.

Fan frustration is understandable. Resident Evil has one of gaming's most recognizable casts, and seeing a movie set in Raccoon City without any of them feels like a deliberate snub. But Cregger isn't being evasive about his reasoning; he's being unusually direct about the creative calculus. He'd rather make a good horror film set in the Resident Evil universe than a mediocre recreation of a story that already exists in a better medium. Whether that gamble pays off, audiences will find out when the film hits theatres on September 18.