Weapons director Zach Cregger plans to make a new Resident Evil adaptation next, which he says won’t slavishly stick to the survival horror franchise’s lore.
Previous Resident Evil movie adaptations haven’t exactly treated their videogame source material like some sacred text. British filmmaker Paul W.S. Anderson used Capcom’s survival horror franchise as a jumping off point for a series of hectic, gun-fu action vehicles for Milla Jovovich, for example.
It’ll soon be Barbarian director Zach Cregger’s turn to adapt the zombie-infested videogames, and while it’s early days for that project, he’s told SFX magazine that, not unlike Anderson, he won’t be “completely obedient to the lore of the games.”
While that isn’t much of a surprise, his other comments are rather encouraging: he adds that, while he won’t slavishly stick to series lore, it’ll remain tonally true to the games’ horror atmosphere.
“I’m trying to tell a story that just feels authentic to the experience you get when you play the games,” he said. “I don’t think I’m breaking any major rules, but I also recognise that no matter what I do, people are going to come for me online.”
Although not without its B-movie elements (not least some of the first game’s dialogue), the Resident Evil games are also filled with moments of genuine suspense and dread. Across the seven films (and short-lived TV series) released to date, it’s difficult to think of any that have delivered a jolt as effective as Resident Evil 1′s now-famous canine hallway sequence – a moment that partly inspired Alex Garland to write 28 Days Later. Or, for that matter, the tension as the player approaches the eerily quiet Spanish village in Resident Evil 4.
A fan of the series in general, Cregger singles out Resident Evil 4 as a particular favourite (“I don’t know how many times I’ve just looped [RE4]”), so it’s just possible he’ll draw on that game for his film’s tone.
Little’s known about Cregger’s Resident Evil movie at present – there are rumours that it involves a hospital, Resident Evil 3 style – though it’s been confirmed that screenwriter Shay Hatten is co-authoring the script. Hatten has a bit of an outrageous sensibility to his writing; his original screenplay for the John Wick spin-off Ballerina had a body count of over 1,400. He also wrote an anarchic and quite funny script called Maximum King – a fictionalised account of author Stephen King’s disastrous debut as a filmmaker, Maximum Overdrive.
Having broken out with the box office success of his horror debut, Barbarian, Zach Cregger has the highly-anticipated chiller Weapons coming to cinemas on the 8th August. About a town in which its youngsters all wake up and vanish early one morning, it sounds frankly terrifying.
Cregger’s Resident Evil is currently due for release in 2026. Of that next project, Cregger told SFX, “All I want to do is just make a really good movie and tell a story that’s compelling. I know that I’m gonna be happy with the movie, and hopefully other people will, too.”
