Sony Pictures has let the first official trailer for Resident Evil have its way with the public, giving viewers their best look to date at what promises to be an unrelenting and unforgiving horror film this year. The long-awaited reboot from Zach Cregger is being rolled out in the wake of the movie’s theater listings, which have put an end to talk about its scope; at 1 hour and 30 minutes, it is as compact a runtime as Cregger wanted for a no-holds-barred kind of theatrical outing.
In the person of Austin Abrams’ Bryan, a medical courier who makes a late-night organ run to the middle of a Raccoon City in the grip of winter, the film forges a new course. It is a conscious move away from the legacy characters one might expect, such as Leon S. Kennedy or Jill Valentine, and certainly from the bloated action of earlier entries in the franchise. Cregger and co-writer Shay Hatten (of John Wick: Chapter 4) have built a story that mirrors the chaos of Resident Evil 2, one designed to hold the viewer in a night of pure survival horror.
Cregger has made no secret in trade press of his desire to sidestep the usual zombie outbreak tropes. “It is not your standard three-act affair,” he says of the film’s momentum, calling it more of a gauntlet. The action is there from the get-go and does not ease off. There are no endless hordes of the undead to be had; instead the tension is derived from T-virus mutations and the sort of resource-scrounging and puzzle-box pacing that is the hallmark of Capcom’s original games.
For Sony, putting this on screen is something of a prestige genre move, capitalizing on the goodwill Cregger has since his 2022 hit Barbarian. With Paul Walter Hauser, Kali Reis and Zach Cherry joining Abrams in the cast, the studio’s version of Resident Evil is set for IMAX and general release on September 18, 2026.