Resident Evil has spent more than two decades trying to work out what it wants to be on the big screen.

Paul W.S. Anderson’s films turned the games into increasingly enormous action spectacles centred on Milla Jovovich’s Alice. Welcome to Raccoon City attempted a more recognisable recreation of game locations and characters.

Now Barbarian and Weapons filmmaker Zach Cregger has taken a third route.

His new Resident Evil opened in cinemas on 18 September 2026, starring Austin Abrams as Bryan, a medical courier who finds himself entering a nightmare around Raccoon City.

The crucial difference is that Cregger is not simply retelling one of the games.

A new character inside the Resident Evil world

Bryan is an original protagonist rather than Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield, Jill Valentine or another established playable hero.

The film instead attempts to recreate the experience of Resident Evil: entering unfamiliar spaces, becoming increasingly trapped, encountering grotesque creatures and trying to work out what on earth is happening before something eats you.

Reviews from AP and The Verge both note the movie’s combination of survival horror, gore, game-inspired structure and dark humour.

The result is therefore neither a direct game adaptation nor a continuation of the Anderson films.

It is its own story built inside Capcom’s world.

The long Resident Evil movie experiment

The first Milla Jovovich film arrived in 2002 and ultimately spawned six movies.

Then 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City rebooted the film continuity and drew much more directly from the games.

Cregger’s version resets the experiment again.

That sounds excessive until you remember just how unusual Resident Evil itself is. Across decades of games, the franchise has moved through claustrophobic survival horror, action, first-person terror, gothic horror and much more.

There is no single Resident Evil tone.

Has Hollywood finally cracked it?

That depends on what individual fans want from an adaptation, and it is not something that can be declared objectively after one weekend.

What can be said is that Cregger has made a deliberate choice not to recreate a famous game plot scene for scene. Instead, he has built a new horror story around the mechanics and atmosphere associated with playing Resident Evil.

That may be why this version feels different.

The question is no longer whether Austin Abrams looks sufficiently like Leon Kennedy.

It is whether watching Bryan stumble deeper into the nightmare makes audiences feel the same horrible sensation as opening one more door in a Resident Evil game when you already know you should probably turn around.

The new Resident Evil is in cinemas now.