Weapons director says his Resident Evil movie will leave everything 'intact' from the games: 'I'm not gonna steal Leon and put him in an original story'

Leon from Resident Evil 4 doing the smoulder among a run-down village.

(Image credit: Capcom)

Zach Cregger is on a roll. The writer and director of 2022's Barbarian and this year's Weapons now has two solid horror hits under his belt, and is in pre-production on his next one: a Resident Evil movie planned for 2026.

That's good news for Resident Evil fans who might otherwise be a bit wary about yet another new Resi movie—the film franchise was already rebooted once, just four years ago, with the thoroughly mid Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Cregger's track record, though based on a small sample size (at least when it comes to feature films) is a good reason to be optimistic.

I think I know what he means. When using a character people are already familiar with, like say Master Chief in the recent Halo TV series, you run the risk of disappointing people who have expectations of that character, like when you show his naked butt, or when he has sex. A safer and more creative approach is to handle it like the Fallout series, which creates mostly original characters and sets them loose in a familiar world.

Both Barbarian and Weapons are effective not just because they're scary, but because they're intriguing. By presenting the story of both films from the perspective of different characters and jumping around in time, we don't get all the information in a linear fashion, which gives both movies a fun sense of mystery. At other times we get information before certain characters do, too, and then we're left dreading the horrible things we know are coming their way.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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