The Resident Evil film series has a storied history that spans two decades of moviemaking and now the new reboot has seemingly found its lead star. Let’s hope it goes a bit better than the last time Sony tried their hand at restarting the franchise from scratch.
The first Resident Evil video game released in 1996 and launched a multimedia franchise that spans gaming, comics, novels, television, movies, and pretty much anything else you can think of. It is hard to overstate just how successful the series is overall. For nearly thirty years, it’s seen almost yearly video game releases, has spawned multiple live-action and animated films, and has even had more than a few stage plays as well. Resident Evil is a genuine cultural phenomenon with a footprint that is nearly incalculable. Iffy quality be dammed, the original Resident Evil film series spearheaded by writer/director Paul W. S. Anderson and starring Milla Jovovich as protagonist Alicia “Alice” Marcus ran for six movies over a fourteen-year period. It is an astonishing box office run from a video game-based franchise during an era of Hollywood filmmaking when movies of that ilk usually died on the vine. Never content to let a moneymaker lay dormant for too long, Sony is pushing full steam ahead on a new Resident Evil film and has reportedly found their lead man.
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Zach Cregger, writer and director of Barbarian, is hard at work on a Resident Evil reboot and the creative team has seemingly found their man to lead the franchise forward. The Hollywood Reporter claims Austin Abrams is Sony Pictures’ first choice for the headlining role in the new Resident Evil film and seeing as Cregger and Abrams just worked together on the yet-to-be-released horror film Weapons, it makes perfect sense. Assuming Weapons—which also stars Josh Brolin, Julia Garner, Alden Ehrenreich, and Benedict Wong—comes out and has a cultural moment a la Barbarian back in 2022, Sony will have a directing-acting duo with the prerequisite horror buzz to get fans excited about the prospect of another Resident Evil reboot.
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Sony Pictures already tried its hand at rebooting the Resident Evil film series back in 2021. Noted horror filmmaker Johannes Roberts wrote and directed Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which was based on the stories of the first two games in the video game series. All signs pointed to a positive outcome when looking at Roberts’ past filmography and the stellar cast list, featuring up-and-comers like Kaya Scodelario and Hannah John-Kamen alongside beloved character actors such as Donal Logue and Neal McDonough. Alas, something was simply lost in translation as critics slammed the film, and it struggled to make a dent at the box office. It was followed up by the similarly disappointing Netflix Resident Evil series that was weirdly set in a different continuity. Welcome to Raccoon City‘s sequels were cancelled and the Netflix series wasn’t picked up for a second season, and it was back to the drawing board.
Cregger certainly has an eye for exciting projects—his last three projects are Barbarian, Companion, and Weapons—so bringing him on board to head up the new movie was a great first move. If he brings Abrams on board, that would be another solid choice. Abrams has been a Hollywood mainstay for nearly fifteen years now, showing up in everything from The Walking Dead and Euphoria to Paper Towns and Wolfs. If you can hold your own in projects as varied as Shameless, Silicon Valley, The Americans, and This Is Us, you’ve got some serious acting chops. It’s unclear if Abrams would be playing a protagonist from the video game series—he looks more like a Leon Kennedy than a Chris Redfield or Ethan Winters—or if he’d be playing an original character like Jovovich did with Alice for all those years.
Whatever the case, it’s hard not to get excited about the project with names like Cregger and Abrams aboard. The world could finally use a great Resident Evil film that is more than just a goofy schlockfest.
Resident Evil
Resident Evil is a long-running survival horror franchise developed by Capcom. Spread across numerous mainline and spin-off entries, the series is known for it’s third and first-person action horror, zombie-related monsters and references, and challenging puzzles.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
