The first trailer for the Sony/Columbia reboot dropped Thursday morning. After 24 years and $1.2 billion at the global box office, the franchise has its best shot yet at being taken seriously.
There has never been anything wrong with the Resident Evil movies, exactly. Six films from 2002 to 2017, anchored by Milla Jovovich and directed largely by Paul W.S. Anderson, generated more than $1.2 billion worldwide and turned a mid-budget zombie property into one of the most reliably profitable video game adaptations in Hollywood history. The math worked. The math always worked.
What didn’t work was the prestige. The Anderson-Jovovich cycle was the kind of franchise reviewers either ignored or used as shorthand for everything that was wrong with the genre — slick, weightless, lore-allergic, indifferent to the source material that made the games one of the most influential horror properties of the last three decades. The 2021 reboot, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, tried to course-correct toward fan service and grossed $42 million on a $25 million budget, which is the kind of result that gets a franchise quietly shelved.
Then Sony hired Zach Cregger.
The first trailer for Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot landed publicly on Thursday morning, two weeks after the director walked the room at CinemaCon to a reception multiple attendees described as the loudest of Sony’s presentation. The footage — Austin Abrams as a medical courier named Bryan, stranded in a snowy night, calling someone he loves to say he might not get to talk to them again — is, by any measure, the most genuinely unsettling moment the franchise has produced in its theatrical history.
That is not a small thing. That is the thing.
The Cregger of it all
Cregger arrives at Raccoon City with the kind of cultural heat that money cannot manufacture and franchises rarely attract. Barbarian (2022) was the surprise horror hit that announced him as a real voice. Weapons (2025) was the consolidation: a $270 million worldwide gross for Warner Bros., a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Amy Madigan, and the kind of sustained critical conversation that turns a director into a brand.
He is, right now, one of perhaps three or four working filmmakers in the genre whose name on a poster meaningfully sells tickets. Sony reportedly beat out three other major studios — including Warner Bros. and Netflix — in a bidding war for the project, and is putting an $80 million production budget behind it, more than double what Cregger spent on Weapons.
This is the first time a Resident Evil film has been treated as something other than a content unit.
What Cregger is actually making
Cregger’s pitch, repeated in CinemaCon and in interviews, is that this version is not a sequel, not a continuation, and not in conversation with the previous six films. He has said publicly that he played “a sh*tload of Resident Evil” over the past two decades and was drawn to the games’ “naturally cinematic” sensibility — the dread, the resource scarcity, the slow-burn architecture of fear. His version, he told the CinemaCon crowd, will have none of the structural games of his previous work — no time jumps, no chapter breaks, no fractured perspectives. Just a protagonist on foot in a city actively trying to kill him.
The story, co-written with Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum, Army of the Dead), follows Bryan (Abrams, Euphoria, Wolfs, and a Weapons alum) on what was supposed to be a routine organ delivery and turns into a single horrifying night in Raccoon City. Paul Walter Hauser, Zach Cherry (Severance), and Kali Reis (True Detective: Night Country) round out a cast that, character by character, is the most respected ensemble the franchise has ever fielded.
Notably absent: Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Albert Wesker. None of the iconic protagonists from Capcom’s games appear. Cregger has said the world is the inheritance; the people in it are his.
The bigger context
Three things make the timing of this reboot more interesting than a typical IP refresh.
The first is the calendar. The Resident Evil video game franchise launched in 1996, which means Capcom’s property is hitting its 30th anniversary in the same year as Cregger’s film. Capcom released Resident Evil Requiem in February — it cleared 5 million units within days. The brand has not been this commercially active in a decade.
The second is the genre weather. The “video game adaptation curse” that defined the 2000s and 2010s has, over the last three years, quietly broken. The Last of Us, Fallout, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, A Minecraft Movie, Sonic the Hedgehog — the conversation has shifted from “can these be good” to “which ones are good.” Resident Evil, ironically, was the franchise that arguably codified the curse in the first place. There would be a certain symmetry to it being the franchise that puts the curse to bed.
The third is the auteur economics of horror. Studios spent the last five years figuring out that mid-budget, R-rated, director-driven horror is the most reliable growth segment in theatrical exhibition. A Cregger Resident Evil is the platonic ideal of that model: name director, established IP, recession-proof genre, controllable budget, viable franchise upside.
The risk
None of this guarantees anything. Cregger is making the most expensive film of his career, working in a register he has never publicly attempted (sustained survival action), inside a fan ecosystem that will scrutinize every prop and every monster design with the intensity Capcom devotees bring to everything. The decision to skip the games’ marquee characters is going to test a portion of the base. There is real downside.
But for the first time, there is also real upside that has nothing to do with opening weekend. A Resident Evil film in serious critical conversation in September would be a genuine first — for the franchise, for Sony’s horror slate, and for the long, strange theatrical history of zombie cinema as prestige object.
The trailer is online. The release date is locked. September 18 will tell us whether the math finally aligns with the meaning.
