Resident Evil (2026) is Zach Cregger’s survival-horror reboot — an original story alongside Resident Evil 2, following courier Bryan through Raccoon City’s worst night.
Get the lineage right first, because this title has carried three. This is the eighth live-action Resident Evil film and the series’ second reboot — not the Paul W. S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich films (2002–2016), not Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), and not the 2022 Netflix series.
The screen history it steps away from, briefly: the Anderson series ran six films across fourteen years around Alice, a protagonist invented for the screen; Welcome to Raccoon City swung the pendulum the other way in 2021, adapting the first two games with their own characters, and underperformed; the Netflix live-action series followed in 2022 and was cancelled. Cregger’s film takes the third road — the games’ world and night, nobody’s game story — which is precisely why none of those earlier casts or continuities appear in its credits.
It is also a released film: it premiered in Los Angeles on 15 September 2026 and opened in U.S. theatres on 18 September 2026. Its boldest choice is who is not in it. There is no Leon, no Claire, no Jill, no Chris — and no Alice, who belongs to the Anderson films alone. Cregger built the film around an original lead, a medical courier named Bryan, on an original mission running parallel to the events of Resident Evil 2 (1998): another man, on another errand, on the other side of town, on the same night. Famously, it is barely a zombie film at all — Cregger has said it uses only two or three proper zombie scenes, with the emphasis on varied mutated creatures instead.
Quick Specs
Director: Zach Cregger
Screenplay: Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten
Based on: Resident Evil by Capcom
Producers: Robert Kulzer, Zach Cregger, Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, Victor Hadida, Carter Swan and Asad Qizilbash
Starring: Austin Abrams, Paul Walter Hauser, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Will Merrick and Johnno Wilson
Music: Hays Holladay and Ryan Holladay
Cinematography: Dariusz Wolski
Production: Columbia Pictures, Constantin Film, Davis Films, Vertigo Entertainment and PlayStation Productions; distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing
Premiere: 15 September 2026, Los Angeles
Release: 18 September 2026 (US)
Runtime: 94 minutes
Rating: R (US); 15 (UK)
Budget: $75–80 million (before marketing)
A Reboot Built Like a Playthrough
Constantin Film began planning another reboot in early 2022, after Welcome to Raccoon City failed critically and commercially and the Netflix series was cancelled. Zach Cregger — whose Barbarian (2022) and Weapons (2025) made him the obvious horror hire — was confirmed as director and co-writer in January 2025, with Constantin CEO Oliver Berben saying the studio gave him “carte blanche to do whatever he wanted to do.” A four-studio bidding war followed, Warner Bros. and Netflix among the bidders, before Sony won distribution in March 2025 with Columbia Pictures overseeing production. Cregger’s approach was a player’s, not an adapter’s: a longtime fan who has played, in his words, “a sh-t ton of Resident Evil,” he set out to make a love letter to the games built on the experience of playing one — one person, limited resources, escalating danger — while deliberately retelling none of their stories. “I’m not going to tell Leon’s story,” he said, “because Leon’s story is told in the games.” His touchstones were Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and Resident Evil 4, with a tone he compared to Evil Dead II; he had not seen any of the previous live-action films. He and Shay Hatten wrote in paired sessions aiming for that Raimi-like energy, though Cregger later cut most of the jokes after test audiences found the film “too funny.” The score, by Hays Holladay and Ryan Holladay, reunited the brothers who had co-scored Weapons with him. Abrams, who had a small role in Weapons, was in talks by March 2025 and confirmed that July; Hauser joined in September, and Cherry, Reis and Wilson in October — Reis playing an ex-military character originally written for a male actor. The cast as released: Abrams as Bryan, the courier; Hauser as Paul and Cherry as Carl, both Umbrella scientists; Reis as Maxine, an Umbrella enforcer; Will Merrick as Dave, another Umbrella scientist; and Johnno Wilson as Wilson, an Arklay County sheriff. Pre-release coverage attached different names to several of those roles; the names here are the post-release ones. Supporting cast includes Zoé Bellas as Birdie, Chris Lew Kum Hoi as Stanley and Griffin Newman as Wade, all Umbrella scientists; Jo Martin as the receptionist Andrea Vasquez; Emily Piggford as Dr. Maria Stokes; Karel Dobrý as a farmer; Andrea Miltnerová as a pedestrian; Sara Paxton voicing Bryan’s girlfriend Michelle; and Cregger himself voicing the hospital intercom. Cregger’s canon position is the careful middle throughout: the story lives in the world of the games, alongside Resident Evil 2’s day of reckoning — it neither claims the games’ own canon nor stands unrelated to them. (Mikey Madison was briefly in negotiations to join at one stage; she is not in the film.) Filming ran in Prague from 10 October 2025 to 22 January 2026, the city dressed as a snowy Raccoon City, with Dariusz Wolski shooting. A CinemaCon presentation came in April 2026 and the teaser trailer on 30 April 2026. Test-screening reports of an unfinished cut described a 90-minute version as “all gas, no brakes” and a “horror version of Fury Road,” with practical effects said to dominate. One clarification: the title The Umbrella Chronicles, sometimes attached to this production, belongs to a different, earlier project from the Welcome to Raccoon City financiers. It is not this film’s working title; no working title for the Cregger film is confirmed. The playthrough feeling was pursued in the shooting itself: interview reporting describes Cregger using a first-person POV camera rig for stretches of the film, putting the audience where a player’s hands would be. A Milan Records soundtrack album was reportedly released alongside the film on 18 September 2026.
The Plot
The official synopsis, carried identically across Sony’s materials: Bryan, a medical courier, “unwittingly finds himself in an action-packed, non-stop race for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in chaos.” Teaser accounts corroborate the shape of it — Abrams’ courier stranded in and around Raccoon City on a snowy night, hunted by raging mutated creatures, in a smaller-scale, grounded survival story rather than an ensemble outbreak epic — and Cregger’s framing completes the design: the night is Raccoon City’s big night, the same one Resident Evil 2 tells, seen from the other side of town by a man whose journey mirrors a game playthrough. Bryan takes a last-minute delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital, hits a woman who steps into the snowy road, and loses his sheriff escort, Wilson, in a crash before the woman attacks him. At a farm he kills a mutated dog and an infected couple whose bodies fuse, tentacled, into a single amalgam; bitten by an infected girl, he is taken in by Umbrella employees Paul and Maxine, who explain that Umbrella’s serum — developed for the U.S. government to rapidly evolve organisms — caused the outbreak in a laboratory accident, and that the hospital scientists need the stabilizer in Bryan’s package to build a cure. Maxine is killed and Paul absorbed into the amalgam; Bryan crosses the city through sewers and rooftop falls of the infected, fights an acid-vomiting mutant in the hospital elevator, and reaches the top-floor laboratory. The ending: Bryan delivers the package as his own infection takes hold, kills the scientists as appendages burst from him, and sends the cure falling from the rooftop, roaring, fully mutated, as National Guard helicopters arrive. It sets up no confirmed sequel.
Release and Money
The release is reported consistently across the record: a Los Angeles premiere on 15 September 2026 at the United Theater on Broadway, a Fantastic Fest screening on 17 September, and a U.S. theatrical opening on 18 September 2026 through Sony Pictures Releasing, filmed for IMAX, with the UK day-and-date including IMAX and ScreenX presentations. An overseas stagger into select Asian and African markets the following weekend, with Japan on 9 October, was reported, as was a digital release date of 3 November 2026. The budget is a range, not a figure: about $75 million in one account, about $80 million in set-visit coverage, before marketing. The gross requires the same discipline, because the tallies conflict wildly by date. By late October 2026, the film had grossed $365 million worldwide ($152 million U.S./Canada and $213 million elsewhere), from a $60 million domestic and $108.3 million worldwide opening weekend with $8.8 million in Thursday previews. The reported weekend trail: a second weekend down 61% to $23.3 million and a third at $8.3 million. Tallies published earlier in the run put the worldwide figure anywhere between roughly $252 million and $320 million, and a later streaming-era piece said “over $280 million” — snapshots at different dates, not rival finals. For franchise scale: the previous seven live-action films grossed over $1.2 billion combined, and Welcome to Raccoon City — the performance that made this reboot necessary — took about $41–42 million.
Reception
The reception is date-stamped, as this film’s whole record has to be. The film holds 96% of 300 critics’ reviews positive on Rotten Tomatoes, average 7.7 out of 10, with the consensus: “Packing unforgettable scares into a sleek runtime while Austin Abrams’ crack comedic timing provides crucial levity, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is a propulsive tribute to the pleasure and terror of playing a truly spooky video game.” Metacritic stands at 79 out of 100 from 51 critics, audiences gave it a B+ CinemaScore, and the Rotten Tomatoes audience score is 91%. It has been called the best-reviewed film in the franchise and the highest-rated video-game film on the aggregators by late October 2026. As for what follows: no sequel is confirmed. Cregger has expressed interest in material from Resident Evil 7 and Village; interest is not an announcement. Think Horror’s own verdict is separate from the record above and lives where it belongs: Resident Evil (2026) Review — Raccoon City Burns Again.