The adaptation of a video game franchise can be a difficult thing. The 90’s and 00’s were littered with adaptations that sort of brought the experience of the original material to the big screen (Street Fighter (1994, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the original Mortal Kombat movies), but in recent years, the needle has been moved in the other direction: perhaps too accurate to the source material.
This choice ends up with mixed results, as we’ve seen this year. Either you’re a 1:1 comparison to the original storytelling, flaws and all (Mortal Kombat II), or you feel like a YouTube compilation of cutscenes (The Super Mario Galaxy Movie).
So how do you make it work?
A side story.
2026’s relaunching of Resident Evil as a film franchise doesn’t try to be something it’s not — it’s not a big action movie like the Paul WS Anderson films, nor is it a 1:1 adaptation of one of the games in the series.
Instead, this feels like its own unique beast — if it were a video game, it’d be your portable system spin-off. There are ideas and concepts from the series — including some clever integrations of iconography — but otherwise, the movie stands alone.
The movie isn’t about Claire Redfield or Leon S. Kennedy, it’s about Bryan. An original character for the film, Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier, whose job it is to transport transplant organs. One fateful, snowy night, he’s tasked with getting a transplant to Raccoon City Hospital. And everything which can go wrong, does. You didn’t think a Resident Evil movie was going to make life easy for someone, did you?
What makes it work? It’s clear Zach Cregger (Director and also Co-Writer of the film alongside Shay Hatten) loves the franchise, and understands the core of what makes it work. It’s not about the lore, or the wikis’ worth of storytelling, it’s about how the game makes you feel. The movie doesn’t let up from the jump, and at a crisp 90-minute runtime, maintains an incredible pace throughout. You’re with Bryan through his entire nightmarish evening — even including some great POV work, homaging the more recent Resident Evil games.
Much digital ink has been spilled about how many people in comedy have become amazing horror filmmakers — Cregger being one of them, starting as a part of the sketch group The Whitest Kids U Know. It makes sense — comedy and horror are both about the tension and the release. But what I found truly surprising about the film was, yes, it’s filled with nightmarish, horrifying gore and absolutely disgusting effects (as it should be), but it’s also absolutely hilarious at times.
Look, to say much more would be to start to cut into what makes the movie great — being so lean, it’s pretty much all meat, so I can’t divulge too much. But this spooky season, try to make it out to the theater and see this one big and loud with an audience hyped to laugh and scream their way through it all.
Resident Evil (2026) is in theaters now.