Sony has won the bidding war for the Resident Evil movie reboot—the same studio that released the first (bad) six Resident Evil live action movies, plus the Jovovich-less (and still bad) reboot Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City in 2021.
Some things never change, I guess. Maybe the eighth time will be the charm?
As we reported in January, the new Resident Evil reboot (coming just four years after the first reboot) is being written and directed by horror's new hotness, Zach Cregger, and the project was being shopped around between multiple studios. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sony came out on top, keeping it out of the eagerly clawing hands of Warner Bros and Netflix.
It's not hard to understand why Sony would want to hang onto those Resident Evil rights: despite not a single one of its Resident Evil films scoring above 38% on Rotten Tomatoes, the series has been monstrously successful financially, collectively earning over $1.2 billion at the box office.
But will this second reboot be good? All signs point to: we have literally no way of knowing. The script hasn't even been written, but Cregger's 2022 horror film Barbarian was good, so maybe?
The film is also being produced under Sony's Columbia Pictures label this time around, not Screen Gems as the earlier RE films were. This may indicate a larger budget than the RE franchise has historically had: Columbia is the same label as the Spider-Man Universe films like Venom, Kraven, and, uh, Morbius. Those movies aren't good, but they were expensive! So that's… something.
We'll have to wait a while to see how this all pans out. Despite not having a script or a cast, the Resident Evil reboot already has a release date: September 18, 2026.
