Zach Cregger's Resident Evil reboot has wrapped production, which means we're about six months away from finding out whether this cursed franchise can finally get a decent movie adaptation.
The Resident Evil film series has a perfect record: Six Paul W.S. Anderson films starring Milla Jovovich, all terrible in exactly the same way. Then a 2021 reboot that somehow managed to be worse. It's actually impressive how consistently this franchise has failed to translate zombie horror and corporate conspiracy into watchable cinema.
Cregger is an interesting choice to break the curse. His 2022 horror hit Barbarian demonstrated he understands how to build dread and subvert expectations. He's also shown he can work within genre constraints while adding his own voice. That's exactly what Resident Evil needs: a filmmaker who respects the source material without being slavishly devoted to it.
The games work because they balance survival horror with pulpy corporate evil. The movies keep trying to turn that into The Matrix with zombies, which misses the point entirely. Resident Evil should feel claustrophobic and desperate, not like a leather-clad superhero fest.
Will Cregger get it right? The optimistic take is that Sony hired a director with a distinct vision and let him cook. The pessimistic take is that this is still a studio franchise based on a video game, and those have their own gravitational pull toward mediocrity.
We'll know soon enough. For now, let's appreciate that someone in Hollywood looked at the Resident Evil franchise's track record and thought, "What if we tried something different?" That alone is progress.
