Sony released the first official trailer for the new Resident Evil film on April 30, 2026. The movie hits theaters September 18.
Fans of the franchise, which has made a mark on video game culture for years, are now excited to see the franchise head to the big screen once again.
The director is Zach Cregger, the man who made Barbarian and Weapons, two of the most acclaimed original horror films of the past four years, and the trailer looks nothing like any Resident Evil movie that has come before it.
What Does The Trailer Show?
The trailer opens on a man trudging through snow toward a dark, empty house. He knocks. No answer.
He goes inside and finds a phone. He calls someone, his girlfriend, and what he says in that call sets the entire tone of what this movie is trying to be.
“Some things have happened,” he tells her. “I’m in a seriously f*cked-up situation. We might not get to talk to each other again.”
The man is Bryan, played by Austin Abrams. He is a medical courier. He was trying to deliver a package to a remote hospital in Raccoon City. He did not make it.
What got between him and the delivery is what the rest of the trailer shows in flashes, him running through the snow, loading a shotgun, a large and deeply unsettling creature visible in the sewers that one reviewer likened to a cross between something from the games and the grotesque Baron Vladimir Harkonnen from Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films.
Bloodied zombies. An overturned vehicle. Bodies falling in a snow-covered street.
The trailer is atmospheric and grounded and deliberately restrained compared to the franchise’s previous Hollywood iterations. It does not look like the Paul W.S. Anderson films.
It does not look like a Marvel movie with monsters. It looks like Zach Cregger made a Resident Evil film, which is simultaneously the most specific and the most meaningful thing you can say about it.
Who Is Zach Cregger?
Cregger is 42 years old and was, until five years ago, best known for being one of the co-creators of the sketch comedy show Whitest Kids U’ Know.
Then he wrote and directed Barbarian in 2022, a horror film about a woman who discovers someone else has already booked the Airbnb she rented in Detroit, and the film became one of the most talked-about horror releases of its year, earning him a reputation as one of the sharpest genre filmmakers working in Hollywood.
He followed it with Weapons in 2025, a more ambitious and structurally complex horror film that became a genuine cultural event. Amy Madigan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in it.
The film grossed more than $270 million worldwide on an independent budget. Cregger went from sketch comedian to Oscar-affiliated blockbuster filmmaker in the span of three years, and he did it making films that were entirely his own ideas.
Which makes Resident Evil the unexpected move. An IP franchise based on a 30-year-old video game series is not what most people would have predicted as Cregger’s follow-up to Weapons. He has been transparent about why he took it anyway.
“That’s an original screenplay, by the way. It’s a weird story. I wrote it, and I love the story.
It has nothing to do with any of the other Resident Evil movies,” he said in a Hollywood Reporter interview. “If I do my job, it will feel fresh and edgy and weird.”
He also cited his own fandom. Cregger is a longtime Resident Evil player, and that genuine enthusiasm for the source material is reflected in one of the most specific creative choices the film makes.
Why They Chose To Not Include Known Characters
The Resident Evil games are defined by their characters as much as their monsters, Leon S. Kennedy, Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, Ada Wong.
They are among the most recognizable protagonists in video game history. Every previous Resident Evil film has had to make a choice about how to handle those characters, with mixed results at best.
Cregger made the choice to leave them entirely alone.
“Leon exists in the games. I don’t want anyone to ruin that for me,” he told GamesRadar+ during a set visit in 2025. “I figure if I am honoring the games, I’m just going to tell another story that feels like playing in the world of the game, but I’m not stepping on the toes of any of Leon’s storyline. I’m not recasting Leon, god forbid. You know, I’m letting Leon stay Leon.”
The film instead follows Bryan, an original character with no history in the game franchise, whose story takes place on the periphery of the events of Resident Evil 2.
Raccoon City is having its catastrophic night. Bryan is caught in the middle of it.
His perspective is that of a complete outsider, a courier who drove into the wrong city on the wrong evening and now has to survive until morning.
That framing is one of the oldest and most effective structures in horror, the ordinary person confronted by the extraordinary, and it is what made the original Resident Evil games work before they became action franchises.
The first game is about being trapped. The second is about a city falling apart around two people trying to get out. Cregger is making a movie about a third person trying to do the same thing, from a slightly different angle.
The Full Cast
Austin Abrams plays Bryan in his first leading role in a major studio film. His breakout in Weapons, he played a teenager in one of the film’s interconnected storylines, earned him the Resident Evil offer before Weapons had even been released, which says something about how compelling his screen presence was in early cuts.
Paul Walter Hauser plays Carl. Hauser is one of the more in-demand character actors in Hollywood right now, Richard Jewell, I, Tonya, BlackBerry, Cobra Kai, and his involvement suggests the film is not treating the supporting roles as afterthoughts.
Zach Cherry plays Dave, a scientist. Cherry is best known for Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, You and the Netflix series Resident Evil, which gives him the distinction of appearing in both the cancelled Netflix adaptation and this one.
Kali Reis plays Pauline, an ex-military character that was originally written for a male actor.
Reis is a world champion boxer who made her acting breakthrough in True Detective: Night Country. Johnno Wilson rounds out the confirmed cast as Max.
The screenplay was written by Cregger alongside Shay Hatten, who previously co-wrote Army of the Dead, John Wick: Chapter 4 and Army of Thieves.
The combination of Cregger’s horror instincts and Hatten’s experience with large-scale action and genre filmmaking is a deliberate pairing that reflects the $80 million budget the film is working with, more than double what Weapons cost.
Why Resident Evil Films Have Failed In The Past
The Resident Evil franchise has had one of the most complicated Hollywood histories of any video game adaptation.
Paul W.S. Anderson directed the original 2002 film and five sequels through 2016, with Milla Jovovich as Alice, a character invented for the films who does not exist in the games.
That series was frequently derided by game fans for its departure from source material but performed well enough commercially to run for six installments.
When it finally concluded, Constantin Film attempted a harder reset with Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City in 2021, directed by Johannes Roberts.
That film went the opposite direction, directly adapting the first two games, using Leon and Claire as protagonists, attempting to capture the atmosphere of the original games more faithfully.
Critics were mixed and audiences were largely indifferent. The film grossed approximately $43 million on a $25 million budget, technically profitable but far from the franchise revival its makers hoped for.
A Netflix series in 2022 was cancelled after one season.
Cregger’s film is the second full reboot of the franchise and the eighth Resident Evil film in total.
Sony won the distribution rights in a bidding war against Warner Bros., Netflix and two other studios, a competitive auction that itself signals how much confidence the industry has in what Cregger has delivered.
Why This Film Arrives At The Right Moment
The timing of the release could hardly be better. Resident Evil Requiem, a new entry in the Capcom video game series, became one of the breakout gaming hits of 2026, bringing the franchise back to cultural prominence on the games side at exactly the moment the film is preparing to enter theaters.
A movie arriving in September 2026 with Resident Evil on the title will find an audience whose awareness of the franchise has been freshly renewed.
The film opens September 18. Filming took place in Prague in October 2025 with Dariusz Wolski, the cinematographer behind All the Money in the World, The Martian and the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, serving as director of photography.
The film was in editing by February 2026. For a movie that did not have a trailer until today, it is hitting a very fast production-to-release timeline.
Cregger said at CinemaCon that his goal was to be “true to the spirit of the games.”
The trailer suggests he is attempting exactly that, the dread, the isolation, the sense of something deeply wrong closing in from all directions, without being bound by the specific stories the games have already told.
Bryan is not Leon. Raccoon City’s nightmare is not his nightmare. He just drove into the middle of it.
That might be the only honest way to make a Resident Evil movie in 2026.
