Director Zach Cregger was announced last week as the director of Clue – but now he’s swapped that for a Resident Evil reboot.
Zach Cregger is no longer directing Clue. Instead, the Barbarian director is swapping Sony projects, moving from one movie featuring grisly deaths in a mansion to another movie featuring, well… grisly deaths in a mansion.
Just days after being announced as the director of a new Clue film, based of course on the popular murder mystery board game (known as Cluedo in these parts), Cregger has now exited the project.
Cregger isn’t leaving the Sony stable, however. Instead, he’ll be moving over to the PlayStation Productions arm of the studio to tackle a reboot of one of the studio’s most popular and enduring videogame franchises: Resident Evil.
According to The InSneider, the decision comes largely down to money. Cregger is reported to have wanted $4m to direct Clue, while Sony would only offer $1.5m. When it came to a reboot of the studio’s popular survival horror series, though, Sony was more than willing to meet Cregger’s asking price and so the filmmaker has switched projects.
There’s no word as to who will be picking up the reins with Clue, but Cregger’s appointment as the director of a new Resident Evil adaptation raises several interesting questions.
The project is said to be ‘a full reboot that would start from scratch’, which is to be expected, but we’ve had a couple of stalled attempts to kickstart franchises in the last couple of years. Johannes Roberts 2021 film, Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City was a fun enough effort but didn’t set the world alight, while Netflix’s ill-fated 2022 series was met with an even less friendly critical response.
None of that will perturb Cregger or Sony we imagine, but it does lead to speculation about the entry point that Cregger will take into the series’ lore. The 2021 film used plot points from 1998’s Resident Evil 2 and some elements from 1996’s Resident Evil games. If we had to bet right now, we’d imagine that first game might be the place to draw inspiration from – but who knows? After all, the seven Resident Evil films featuring Milla Jovovich only drew loosely from the games and carved out a significant foothold for themselves.
With Cregger on board, we’d love to see something we haven’t seen before. Perhaps something closer to pure horror or an entirely original story. If Cregger is going to move into franchise filmmaking then we hope he plans on bringing plenty of original ideas with him.
The filmmaker’s currently project, though, is Weapons. New Line Cinema is backing the film and it looks like Cregger will be getting a lot of creative freedom with the film which has been described as a multi-story horror opus in the style of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia. It’s due on 16th January 2026. Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, Austin Abrams and Benedict Wong are all set to star.
We’ll bring you more on Clue and Resident Evil as we hear more.
