The next Resident Evil film is coming in September 2026 it’s now been confirmed, with Zach Cregger directing. More here.
Ever since Barbarian released in 2022 and announced director Zach Cregger as a bold new name in the horror genre, we’ve been waiting patiently for his next film.
That next film is still set to be Weapons, a horror ‘opus’. But it now sounds as though we might well be getting two films from Cregger in the same year, with news emerging that his spin on the survival horror videogame series Resident Evil will release in September of 2026.
It was last September that we first covered reports that Cregger had signed up to tackle Resident Evil, with Sony backing the project after the filmmaker declined to continue developing a remake of Clue with the studio. That agreement is now official, with Sony even publicly dating the film, per Deadline.
With Weapons set to release in January of next year (although a recent report has suggested that Warner Bros were keen to bring it forward into 2025), the addition of Resident Evil into 2026’s calendar means that unless things change, we’ll be getting a double dose of Cregger-directed films next year.
As we speculated when the project was first announced, the new film is said to be returning to the classic first game in the series and will ignore recent 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.
Sony is the home of the Paul WS Anderson-directed, Milla Jovovich-starring Resident Evil films, not to mention Roberts’ 2021 film.
Read more: In The Lost Lands | Milla Jovovich on adapting George RR Martin as an action horror fantasy western
The series has picked up $1.2bn at the global box office thus far, and we’re already excited to see what Cregger chooses to do with the material. Barbarian not only boasted one of 2022’s best horror set-ups, but it also featured one of that year’s most audacious narrative leaps.
Weapons, the filmmaker’s next project, has been compared to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and while no less ambitious, could certainly come in a very different flavour of horror to Barbarian, much like Osgood Perkins’ recent tonal shift within the horror genre between Longlegs and The Monkey.
Possessing the boldness to work with such different tones in the same genre surely bodes well for an adaptation of a game series which has swung wildly between gothic horror (Resident Evil: Village), southern gothic (Biohazard), Avengers-style superhero action horror (Resident Evil 6) and more besides.
We’ll bring you more on this one as we hear it, but with a release date of September next year now confirmed, we’d expect casting news and whatnot to happen in pretty short order.
