While some video game franchises have broken the curse of a faithful and agreeable movie or TV show adaptation, Resident Evil has yet to claim that for itself. Mired in a handful of odd creative liberties made with the IP source material, the bar was lowered dramatically after the release of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which took iconic Resident Evil games and characters and bastardized them.
Zach Cregger’s upcoming Resident Evil movie has had a polarizing effect ever since it was officially announced. It was never going to attempt to adapt the story or characters from the games, irking fans who are desperate to see a faithfully adapted Leon S. Kennedy, for instance, but Cregger’s exceptional Barbarians and Weapons earned him goodwill toward whatever he was to work on next. Now, thanks to an interview Cregger gave, it seems as if Resident Evil will be the adaptation fans have always dreamed of, even if it needed to be explained to them how that would be the case.
Resident Evil Is All About The Gameplay Experience
The biggest mistake any fan of the games can make is watching the first trailer for Cregger’s Resident Evil movie and not also listening to the director’s insightful, annotative analysis of it that he gave in a roundtable interview. Here, Cregger points out great Resident Evil Easter eggs, such as the sneaky placement of a green herb in a bucket, and discusses ways that the movie will play out in the same way that players typically progress through a Resident Evil game.
For example, it is neat that the Resident Evil movie’s protagonist will be more like Ethan Winters than, say, Chris Redfield, and grapple with inventory/resource management as he loots for ammunition and key items. Likewise, Bryan will gradually discover new weapon ‘upgrades,’ and must solve his way through environmental puzzles as he travels from the country to the city. It will be interesting to see how this gameplay formula translates to a movie, but there should be no question that it will be faithful to that experience, as Cregger himself is obviously a passionate fan of the games.
Cregger’s Resident Evil Dismisses Lore, And That’s Okay
The game that Resident Evil will share the most in common with as an adaptation, inadvertent or not, is probably Resident Evil: Outbreak, due to it following a random character/survivor in Raccoon City. Plus, Cregger has explicitly stated that he imagines the story of the movie taking place alongside the events of Resident Evil 2, when the T-Virus outbreak struck Raccoon City.
“I like to think that, you know, everything that’s going on in the police station could be happening in this world; this is just another dude, on another mission, on the other side of town.”
However, if it was accurately immersed into the lore, Bryan should feasibly be able to travel to the other side of Raccoon City and visit Leon at the RPD if he wanted to, and that simply would not make sense when it is snowing in the movie’s version of Raccoon City. Likewise, thanks to a video taken from the snowy set of the movie, we know that Cregger’s Resident Evil zombies can run, apparently.
In the games, ordinary zombies that players come across in Raccoon City only lunge or stumble at them when they are not idly roaming or doggedly approaching with their arms raised.
These are big enough inaccuracies that reconciling the movie’s story taking place within the world of the games seems impossible (choosing for it to be in the middle of winter is an incredibly peculiar choice). Regardless, it is of little importance whether the Resident Evil franchise’s lore and timeline of events are adapted faithfully if the movie itself will be a fun and faithful adaptation of the gameplay experience.
Resident Evil is scheduled to be released in theaters on September 18, 2026.
