Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil 2026 is ding things a little differently than it’s predecessors, from what we know so far from the director. The Resident Evil franchise has had a complicated relationship with Hollywood, to put it nicely. Between Paul W.S. Anderson’s long-running action series starring Milla Jovovich and the 2021 reboot that tried to go back to basics and still didn’t quite land, the games have never really translated to screen in a way that satisfied fans.
Now Zach Cregger is taking a deliberately different approach, one that involves stepping away from the source material almost entirely. Here’s what Cregger has said about it and why.
Cregger thinks adapting the games directly would be a waste of time. Speaking after the release of the first teaser trailer of Resident Evil 2026, Cregger explained that he felt there was “kind of no winning” in telling Leon’s story, because the games already do it so well. In his words, it would be “redundant, and ultimately disappointing.”
Talking about that he explained,
“To me, I would feel like there’s kind of no winning if I were to tell Leon’s story, because the games do such a great job. It would just be kind of redundant, and ultimately, I think disappointing. So I would rather just kind of celebrate everything I love about the games by telling the story that could exist on the sidelines of one of the games.”
Cregger has also been clear that this is an original screenplay he wrote himself, describing it as “a weird story” to the Hollywood Reporter and that it has nothing to do with the previous Resident Evil films. His goal is for it to feel “fresh and edgy and weird.”
Everything we know about Resident Evil 2026
Resident Evil 2026 is co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten, based on the Capcom video game series. It’s the second reboot and eighth overall installment in the live-action film series, telling an original story set within the game world but unrelated to all previous films.
The film centers on a medical courier named Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, who becomes stranded in Raccoon City during the outbreak. The cast also includes Paul Walter Hauser, Zach Cherry as a scientist, and Kali Reis as an ex-military character that was originally written for a male actor.
Production is a co-venture between Constantin Film, Vertigo Entertainment, and PlayStation Productions, with Sony Pictures’ Columbia Pictures handling distribution after winning a bidding war that included Warner Bros. and Netflix.
Resident Evil 2026 will be in theaters on September 18, 2026
Edited by Nibir Konwar