After garnering universal acclaim for his previous horror projects, Barbarian and Weapons, director Zach Cregger has been met with quite a bit of backlash for his upcoming Resident Evil reboot - even though nobody aside from a handful of critics has seen the movie yet.
A lot of fans are unhappy with Cregger's decision to, for all intents and purposes, ignore the established lore of the video games by introducing new characters and storylines.
"There are different kinds of Resident Evil fans," Cregger tells THR when asked about the negative response. "There are fans like me who love the experience of playing the games and think there’s never been a movie that has represented what it feels like to play Resident Evil. That’s how I categorize myself as a fan. Then there are fans of the games who specifically love the lore and the characters and the nitty-gritty details of the backstory.
But my movie is not spending a lot of currency on those things. I’m not putting any of the legacy characters into this movie. So if that is what you love about these games, then you’re going to feel a certain way about it. 'Here comes yet another Hollywood movie, and they’re once again not doing Leon and all the characters I was hoping they were going to do.'"
Cregger did make a few changes after feedback from test screenings, however. "I learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny. So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible. I then found that not only did the audience enjoy the movie more, but I also liked the movie a lot more. A little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie, and there’s not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss. So that perspective was really helpful."
From the mind of visionary filmmaker Zach Cregger (Weapons, Barbarian) comes a thrilling — and terrifying — reinvention of the Resident Evil franchise. In an all-new story, Resident Evil follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who unwittingly finds himself in an action-packed, non-stop race for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in chaos.
The cast also includes Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser. Cregger directs from a screenplay he wrote with Shay Hatten, and producers include Robert Kulzer, Zach Cregger, Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, Carter Swan, and Asad Qizilbash. The executive producers are Oliver Berben, Victor Hadida, Richard Wright, and Robert Bernacci.
Resident Evil is set to be released in theaters on September 18.