The first teaser for Zach Cregger‘s Resident Evil is here, and it does not look like anything this franchise has produced before. It does however, look exactly like what Cregger makes. The film opens September 18, 2026 in theaters and IMAX via Sony.
The Setup
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier who arrives at an empty house in the middle of a snowy night, calls someone to say he may not be able to speak to them again, and then spends the rest of the teaser discovering what he is actually surrounded by.
The film does not use Leon S. Kennedy or Jill Valentine, and it has no connection to the Paul W.S. Anderson films that ran from 2002 to 2016. Cregger has said he deliberately avoided retelling game stories because the fans already have those. He wanted a new entry point: a wrong place, wrong night, no-exit setup, built from inside the mythology rather than around its most familiar edges.
Paul Walter Hauser appears alongside Abrams. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Johnno Wilson round out the cast. The screenplay was co-written with Shay Hatten, who wrote John Wick: Chapters 3 and 4. Resident Evil is a co-production of Constantin Film, Vertigo Entertainment, and PlayStation Productions. Filming took place in Prague.
The Director
Two films in and Cregger has already done more to define the shape of contemporary horror than most directors manage across an entire career. Barbarian (2022) did things with a Detroit Airbnb that nobody saw coming, and its specific talent was making every assumption you walked in with feel like the setup for a trap.
Weapons (2025) followed with a 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and a story about an entire classroom of children disappearing on the same night that kept moving across genres without losing its grip on any of them. Both films are built around the idea that the most effective horror is structural, arriving through architecture you do not recognize until it is already over your head.
Resident Evil is a franchise built around viral outbreaks, Umbrella Corporation negligence, and the specific horror of institutions doing monstrous things behind clean branding. Cregger makes films about exactly that kind of failure. The overlap is not subtle. It is, in retrospect, the obvious hire.
What This Is
Every previous live action Resident Evil film existed somewhere on a spectrum from stylish action to full camp, with Milla Jovovich carrying most of the weight across a run that lasted fourteen years. That franchise was not trying to be scary. The Cregger teaser is. It is dark and still and operates as if something has already gone wrong before anything has technically happened yet, which is the register that both Barbarian and Weapons lived in and that the games, at their best, have always understood.
Cregger has confirmed this is an original story with no connection to the previous films. That is either a promise or a warning depending on how much you loved the Anderson era. For everyone else it is the best news the franchise has had in a while.