A hundred and fifty pounds of blood-filled dummy fell six stories and missed Austin Abrams’ head by about an inch. It is in the finished movie. Zach Cregger described the moment at San Diego Comic-Con with the cheerful calm of a man who has clearly replayed it a few times since, and then added the line that tells you everything about how this “Resident Evil” got made: “If he’d been an inch to the right, he would have definitely died.”
The full trailer went public on Comic-Con’s opening day, and it is a genuine escalation from the teaser. We now know what this thing is. Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier — a guy whose job is driving transplant organs from one place to another — and one of his deliveries takes him to Raccoon City General Hospital on the worst night in that city’s history. That is the movie. Not a squad, not a special forces unit, not a returning hero. A delivery driver with a cooler in the back. Warning: beyond this point there are spoilers for “Resident Evil” and the trailer’s plot setup, creature reveals and the Raccoon City connection.
A hundred and fifty pounds of blood-filled dummy fell six stories and missed Austin Abrams’ head by about an inch. It is in the finished movie.”
The trailer is loaded with things put there specifically for people who have played the games, and they are not the obvious ones. There is a shot of Abrams scrounging for bullets, which anyone who has ever inventory-managed their way through a Capcom hallway will feel in their spine. There is a typewriter sitting in a house he enters, unexplained, doing nothing — the save-room icon, dropped in as furniture. There are shotgun shells with “Heavy Field” branding on the box, lifted straight from “Resident Evil 4” and “Resident Evil 5.” None of it is a wink at the camera. It is set dressing that happens to be canon.
Umbrella is in this, and not as a logo on a wall. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser are all playing Umbrella scientists, which reframes the whole thing — this is not a random outbreak the movie stumbles into, it is a corporate disaster with people in the building who knew. Raccoon City itself gets confirmed at the end of the trailer, and the film sits alongside the events of “Resident Evil 2” rather than retelling them, drawing on the second and third games plus “Resident Evil 4” for its texture.
What you will not find is a single face from the marquee. No Leon Kennedy. No Claire Redfield. No Jill Valentine. Cregger has been direct about why, and his reasoning is the most persuasive thing he said all week. “I didn’t take a story from the games and turn that into a movie, because I’m not going to do better than the games do. I am not gonna tell Leon’s story better than the game’s telling me the story. I feel like it would be kind of a losing endeavor for me to try and redo something that was already done so excellently.” Instead: “For me, a love letter to these games is to make a story that feels like the experience I get when I play the games.”
That is the whole thesis, and it is a smarter one than four previous attempts managed. The Paul W.S. Anderson films spent six movies and fourteen years building an original character in Alice (Milla Jovovich) and turning survival horror into wire-fu. The 2021 reboot went the opposite way, cramming the first two games together with the right names and none of the dread. The Netflix series lasted a season. Every version so far has treated fidelity as a casting problem. Cregger is treating it as a feel problem.
Listen to how he describes the design and you can hear the controller in his hands. “I like this slow, creeping dread. I like the idea of one person moving on their feet from point A to point B, and they have to enter a gauntlet and go deeper and deeper and deeper into hell.” Then the part that made us sit up: “I like the idea of starting with a pistol, and you have to keep track of how many bullets you have, and then you graduate to a shotgun, and you get a machine gun, and the world just is hell-bent on destroying you, and you feel like you do not have enough resources to survive this, but you’ve got to figure out how to make it.” That is a description of a game loop being used as a screenplay structure, and we have honestly never heard a director pitch an adaptation that way before.
Here is a detail that should recalibrate expectations, though. Cregger says the film contains only two or three actual zombie scenes — and that most of them are in the trailer you just watched. The undead are the marketing, not the movie. He is aiming at the franchise’s weirder creature work instead, with monster designs pulling from “Resident Evil 6.” If you go in expecting a two-hour zombie siege because the trailer sold you one, that is on the trailer.
Back to the blood bags, because the way that sequence was built explains the whole production. “We had to set up all these frames and string all these 150-pound human sacks that were loaded with liquid blood,” Cregger said, describing a long run where Abrams sprints while bodies detonate around him. “All these things had to happen together. Austin had to run at a consistent speed. We had to have a camera truck follow him really close. If he’d tripped, they would have run him over and killed him.” The bags came down from six stories. They coated the camera lens on multiple takes. One dropped early and grazed his star’s head.
He could have done it with a keyboard. He chose not to. “I didn’t want to do it with VFX. I’m not afraid to use them, but I wanted to do as many practical detonations as possible, because that was gonna make it look tangible and real.” Some explosions got digital help in the end, but the physics are real, and Cregger’s verdict on the risk is not one a studio lawyer will enjoy reading: “I would do it 20 more times if I had to.”
The reason anyone is taking this seriously is what he did last year. “Weapons” grossed around $270 million worldwide on a $38 million budget, held a Rotten Tomatoes score in the mid-nineties, pulled an A-minus CinemaScore — a grade horror almost never gets — and won Amy Madigan an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress as Aunt Gladys. That is not a genre director having a good year. That is a director with leverage. He also confirmed at the panel that the Gladys prequel is moving, exploring how that character became what audiences met in “Weapons,” co-written with Zach Shields and currently dated for September 2028. He said there is “an amazing story to be told” there, while stopping short of committing to direct it.
“Resident Evil” opens September 18, including IMAX screens, shot in Prague on an $80 million budget and running lean at somewhere around ninety-odd minutes. The BR team has been burned by this franchise on film more times than we care to count. But a director who refuses to touch Leon, builds his structure out of ammo scarcity, and drops real weight from six stories because the physics look better — that is the first “Resident Evil” pitch in twenty-four years that sounds like it was made by someone who actually plays them.
What Do You Think? Does building the movie around an ordinary courier instead of Leon or Jill finally solve the adaptation problem, or does it strip out the exact characters people are buying a ticket to see? If only two or three zombie scenes exist and most are already in the trailer, has Sony sold audiences a film that does not exist? And after “Weapons” turned a $38 million original into a $270 million awards player, is Cregger the right person to inherit Raccoon City, or the last person who needed a franchise?
See you on the next binge!
