Film Resident Evil Terhenti Sampai Zach Cregger Muncul

On paper, Zach Cregger directing a Resident Evil movie sounds like a smart move. The director has earned critical acclaim for his work on spooky flicks like Barbarian and Weapons, while Resident Evil is experiencing a resurgence thanks to several years of hit games. But that's a pairing that almost never came to be, as after the dismal box office performance of 2021's Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, movie distributor Constantin Films--who own the film rights to Resident Evil-- wanted to give the franchise a chance to rest before greenlighting a new project.

That all changed when Cregger approached the company, as Constantin Films CEO Oliver Berben said that he already had ideas in mind for the Resident Evil movie he wanted to make. This was prior to the release of Weapons, as Barbarian had shown that the former member of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U Know was a heck of a horror movie director; his follow-up film put him on the Hollywood map as a rising star behind the camera.

"Zach Cregger actually approached us, together with Roy Lee (a producer on Cregger's movies). He basically came to us,  and asked if this franchise, if this IP, was available," Berben said in an episode of The Town. "And it was really strange because at that time, first of all, we were in that situation that we said, 'Okay, we're going to leave it alone. We're going to need to find a completely new way on how to adapt this for the future.'  And on the other hand, Zach, just only came out of Barbarian.  So it wasn't at all that everybody was jumping on it immediately."

"He came to the table and he had this idea. In his head, he knew exactly what he wanted, and he presented it to (Constantin Films co-president) Robert Kulzer in a cafe in Beverly Hills. And he knew the whole movie. He knew everything he wanted to do, and it was so different from everything we had done so far that we started digging into it. It was more moody, more like the game. He's a gamer, he loved playing the games. So he came to this from a completely new direction."

Berben added that Cregger had not seen the live-action movies directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, and that Cregger's pitch of a "normal guy" thrown into a nightmarish situation won over the studio's leadership.  It's not too long to go now before Resident Evil hits theaters--September 18--and ahead of its release, Cregger has been doing the media rounds to talk about the movie. The director recently spoke about how Resident Evil was originally a funnier movie before he dialed back the jokes, and he even took time to weigh in on the physical media debate for video games--spoiler: he's fine with digital games, even if he's aware of potential pitfalls with them.

If box office predictions are on the money, Resident Evil could scare up the best opening weekend in the entire film franchise, as analysts are estimating that it could make between $40 and $50 million in North American alone.