Zach Cregger's Resident Evil opens in UK cinemas on 18 September, a day after its premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin. It is the eighth Resident Evil film and the second attempt at a clean restart, and it makes a proposition the earlier films never did: an original story, no Leon, no Jill, and a director whose last horror film took $270 million on a $38 million budget.
What is Resident Evil (2026) about?
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier who moves transplant organs for a living. He takes a job that pays double, destination Raccoon City, and the delivery goes wrong in the way deliveries to Raccoon City tend to. Cregger, who co-wrote the script with Shay Hatten, describes it as a story running in parallel to Resident Evil 2, in a contemporary alternate timeline rather than the game's 1998. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser play Umbrella scientists; Johnno Wilson is an Umbrella enforcer. It runs 93 minutes, was shot in Prague, and Sony is releasing it in IMAX.
Why no Leon Kennedy?
Because, in Cregger's words, the games have already told that story. He has compared his approach to Evil Dead II: a film that shares the source's nervous system without re-enacting its plot. That is a deliberate break from Welcome to Raccoon City, the 2021 reboot that leaned hard on game fidelity, put Leon, Claire, Chris and Jill on screen together, and took $42 million worldwide against a 30 per cent critics' score. Fidelity, it turned out, was not the problem that needed solving. Cregger is trying a third road, after the game-faithful reboot and the six Paul W.S. Anderson action films: a horror film first, a Resident Evil film by atmosphere.
What appears in the trailer?
The full trailer arrived on 23 July, and its connections to the games are textural rather than narrative. Bryan rummages through drawers for bullets, the survival-horror ritual every player recognises. There is a typewriter in a house. The closing card names Raccoon City, which coverage at the time noted was the first unambiguous link to the source after teasers that could have been any Cregger film. There is no sign of the police station, the mansion or the games' named cast: this is a different corner of the same outbreak. Bryan also carries a smartphone, which is what "contemporary alternate timeline" means in practice.
How is it being received?
Carefully, so far. The first reactions published at the start of September came from an early screening of only the film's first 30 minutes, so they are impressions rather than reviews. Those impressions were warm: a filthy, brutal atmosphere with no hand-holding, dark humour alongside the terror, and Abrams' clumsy, panicked energy praised for feeling like a player fumbling through a first run. Reviews proper will follow the premiere. Cregger's record is the more reliable guide: Barbarian in 2022 and Weapons in 2025 both opened to strong reviews, Weapons landing at 93 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and 81 on Metacritic, and both made far more than they cost. Sony has spent $80 million here, roughly double the Weapons budget, which says where the studio's confidence lies: the director rather than the brand.
Why does it matter?
Resident Evil has been adapted for the screen more often than almost any other video game and still has no film that critics take seriously. If Cregger's version works, it changes what a game film is allowed to be: not a greatest-hits reel of recognisable characters, but a new story inside a world the audience already trusts. If it does not, the case for keeping the heroes on screen gets stronger.
Save the date
Resident Evil premieres at Fantastic Fest on 17 September 2026 and opens in UK cinemas, including IMAX, on 18 September. Cregger's next confirmed project is Gladys, a Weapons prequel dated for September 2028.
Halidom's video game editions include Prime 1 Studio's Leon S. Kennedy and PureArts' life-size Nemesis bust.