Forget everything you know about Resident Evil adaptations. Zach Cregger’s version just dropped its official trailer, and it looks nothing like what came before.
Sony releases Resident Evil in theaters and IMAX on September 18, 2026. The film runs 1 hour 35 minutes, making it one of the leanest entries in the franchise’s history. Cregger co-wrote the script with Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapters 3 & 4).
Austin Abrams (Weapons) plays Bryan, a medical courier who stumbles into Raccoon City on the worst night of its existence. One fateful delivery drops him into the middle of a T-virus outbreak. From there, it’s a nonstop race for survival through chaos, mutation, and increasingly horrifying things the virus does to human bodies.
Cregger has been very clear about that, and the trailer backs him up. He explained, “This movie doesn’t utilize zombies that much. It’s much more focused on the weird creature stuff than the zombies. There’s really only two scenes, maybe three, where there’s proper zombie stuff going on.” His reasoning? “You have this opportunity for the T-Virus to do all these really fascinating things to the human body, and to just limit it to zombies feels like a squandered opportunity.” The trailer teases those mutations, and they look genuinely unsettling.
For franchise fans, Cregger hasn’t forgotten where this comes from. The trailer includes signature Resident Evil shotgun shells, environmental details pulled directly from the games, and a visual language that clearly knows its source material. It’s an original story told within a deeply familiar world.
Resident Evil opens in theaters and IMAX on September 18 from Sony.
