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Barbarian and Weapons director Zach Cregger is already, from the sound of it, happily chin-deep in his next project – a Resident Evil movie he's glad to make without ever having seen a Resident Evil movie before.
"All I can say is that it is true to the experience of the games," Cregger says in a new interview with entertainment podcast Double Toasted. He explains that the film – currently scheduled to release in 2026, with Euphoria actor Austin Abrams starring as its original protagonist – "takes place in the world of the games."
"And what that means is," he continues, "it follows one protagonist from point A to point B as they just descend deeper and deeper and deeper into hell."
The slew of existing Resident Evil films featuring Milla Jovovich as their slick, zombie-hunting princess do provide their own version of an infectious, greasy Hell, but they're also notoriously inconsistent action movies that really only share a name with Capcom's horror games.
Cregger, instead, maintains that he's played "many thousands and thousands of hours of Resident Evil," and "I just feel like I know how that pacing can go."
"It's inherently cinematic," he continues, promising that his movie interpretation will be "a much bigger scale than Weapons," a box office behemoth, having recently grossed $200 million worldwide, "and certainly Barbarian. And [...] I've never seen a movie like it."
More specifically, "I've never seen a Resident Evil movie," says Cregger, "and so, you know, I imagine that if there are people out there that are just rabid fans of the movie franchise, they're probably not really prepared for what I'm going to be doing. But I think the people that are fans of the games are probably going to be stoked."
Prepare your nerves with our list of the 30 best horror movies that will haunt you long after the credits roll.
