Zach Cregger, the writer-director behind the hit “Resident Evil” reboot, says the public debate over his film left him frustrated because it rarely addressed what was on screen. He made the remarks on Matthew Belloni’s podcast “The Town,” in an episode released Oct. 30.
Asked whether he would take on another established property, Cregger said the response to “Resident Evil” gave him pause. Online argument focused on which game characters he had left out, how closely he followed the lore and how the story compared with Capcom’s source material. “All the conversation just felt like it was about not the movie,” he said.
The film reached US theaters Sept. 18 and has crossed $400 million worldwide, according to published box office reports. Cregger moved away from the games’ best-known story, leaving out Leon S. Kennedy and other legacy characters and setting an original survival-horror plot in a snowy 2026. His stated aim was to reproduce the feeling of playing the games rather than retell their plots.
Cregger has not retreated from the result. He told Belloni he is proud of the film and loves it, though he admitted he should have anticipated the fan reaction, and he has said he has ideas for a sequel. He has also left the door open on franchise work. Never say never, he indicated, but he is wary.
The backlash was hardly a surprise to him in advance. At Comic-Con this summer he conceded that if fans demand a one-for-one adaptation, he has failed by that standard. In September he told IGN he had been naive about how his approach would land, and he apologized to those hoping for a different story.
The pressure on him had context. The franchise has a long record of screen adaptations that fans consider loose, and the 2021 reboot, “Welcome to Raccoon City,” flopped. Many players wanted a faithful version of the games’ plots. Others defended his choices, arguing a filmmaker owes viewers a good movie and not a checklist. Hideo Kojima, the game designer, reportedly praised the film for recalling how he felt playing the first “Resident Evil.” Sony has not announced a sequel.
