Hot off Resident Evil, director Zach Cregger is set to make an original sci-fi thriller, The Flood – and it has a star: Jennifer Lawrence. Director Zach Cregger is enjoying the best box office returns of his career to date with Resident Evil, his stripped back and blackly comic videogame adaptation. He’s heading back to ... The Flood | Jennifer Lawrence joins Zach Cregger sci-fi thriller
Hot off Resident Evil, director Zach Cregger is set to make an original sci-fi thriller, The Flood – and it has a star: Jennifer Lawrence.
Director Zach Cregger is enjoying the best box office returns of his career to date with Resident Evil, his stripped back and blackly comic videogame adaptation. He’s heading back to one of his own, more personal projects next, though, following Barbarian and Weapons with a sci-fi thriller called The Flood.
Months after it was announced (see our April 2026 post), The Flood now has one of its lead actors: Jennifer Lawrence, per Variety. The star is no stranger to sci-fi: she played Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games franchise, of course, and also co-starred in Morten Tyldum’s 2016 genre piece, Passengers, in which she was woken up on a spacecraft by Chris Pratt. We should probably gloss over that last one.
So what tempted Lawrence to join another space movie (a genre the singer Adele told her was “the new vampire movie”)? Cregger’s growing reputation as a genre filmmaker is an obvious one. But then there’s the promise of the script: it’s an ensemble piece about the small crew of an exploratory spacecraft encountering a strange, time-distorting anomaly that sends the story on all kinds of grotesque tangents. There are slivers of Interstellar, one section of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and maybe a splash of Event Horizon.
If we were to place a bet, it would be that Lawrence will play Captain Elena Voss, the 40-something captain aboard a ship called the Spiritus Mundi.
That Warner Bros and production company Amblin Entertainment have hired such a high-profile actor might suggest they’re putting aside a big budget for The Flood. But Cregger has repeatedly shown what he can do with small to moderate budgets; Weapons was made for about $38m, but was a $270m horror hit. Its predecessor, Barbarian, was made for about $4m and brought in $46m.
With a track record like that, Cregger might be being given the financing to make something much bigger and more ambitious.
There are five other space explorer roles still to fill aboard the Spiritus Mundi. The Flood is due for release on the 11th August 2028, so we’ll almost certainly be hearing more casting updates soon. As always, we’ll keep you posted.
