Zach Cregger's Resident Evil movie is coming next September

Mark your calendars with gore: The Barbarian director's Resident Evil arrives in theaters on September 18, 2026.

By William Hughes  |  March 7, 2025 | 9:45pm
Zach Cregger, Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Disney
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Zach Cregger's Resident Evil movie is coming next September
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Ever since it was announced back in January, we’ve been low-key fascinated by Zach Cregger’s planned Resident Evil movie. Although we’ll grant that the previous Resident Evil movies do, from a certain point of view, constitute an auteur horror brand—in so far as a decent chunk of them were both written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson—it’s also not a cinematic canon that’s gotten even a fraction of the critical respect that Cregger scored in a single movie with his debut horror offering, Barbarian. We’re genuinely excited to see what the former Whitest Kids U’ Know member, who’s directing and co-writing this new adaptation of the long-running Capcom game series, will do with the brand.

And so, apparently, is Sony, which has officially signed on to release Cregger’s Resident Evil. The studio has—per Variety—come out the winner in the bidding war surrounding Cregger’s movie, which he’s co-writing with Rebel Moon‘s Shay Hatten. It’s also set an official release date for the film, revealing that it’ll be slotting into place just ahead of the formal start of Spooky Season next year, arriving in theaters on September 18, 2026.

There’s no word yet on what kind of story Cregger will try to tell with the brand: The Resident Evil games cover an extremely wide swathe of horror, after growing out of some fairly straight zombie movie riffs in their early going, so anything that vaguely touches on “Evil company creates ‘bio-weapons’ that end up being big scary monsters” is presumably fair game. (Going off pure surface similarities to his previous work, we’ll note that 2017’s soft reboot Resident Evil 7: Biohazard had some pretty hefty Barbarian energy.) The franchise most recently arrived in theaters (sort-of) in 2021, with pandemic box-office bomb Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City. Cregger, meanwhile, has a whole other movie to debut before then; his next film, Weapons, is set for a January 2026 release.

 
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