Resident Evil movie trailer looks like the exact opposite of Street Fighter

After so many other attempts, the newest live action Resident Evil movie may be the first genuinely good one, based on its first trailer.

While Capcom’s been on a winning streak this year with its video games, including Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, it remains to be seen if its movie ventures will be as warmly received.

This autumn will see a double dose of Capcom movies hitting cinema screens, with Resident Evil on September 18 and then Street Fighter on October 16.

The latter saw a new fan service-laden trailer just a couple of weeks ago and now Resident Evil has received its first trailer. And intriguingly, it’s completely devoid of any recognisable iconography.

On a first watch, there’s nothing that indicates that this movie has anything to do with Resident Evil, especially since it stars a completely original character – Bryan – instead of any of the regulars from the games.

However, it’s a very effective trailer regardless and, on closer inspection, there are some elements that have been subtly lifted from the games, such as the use of fixed camera angles and Bryan searching drawers for items.

We only get some vague glimpses of the monsters and while there are no clear shots of traditional Resident Evil zombies, one of them does seem like it might be emulating Lisa Trevor from the Resident Evil 1 remake.

Director Zach Cregger, whose profile has skyrocketed thanks to the critical and commercial success of Weapons, has promised that more Easter eggs will be found in the final movie, including some direct references to Resident Evil 4.

‘There’s a lot of Easter eggs for the games, and that goes beyond things like the weapon progression and the resource management. [Resident Evil] 4 is probably the game I played the most, so I took a lot of healing items, I mimicked them exactly, I put them in the film,’ Cregger says in a PlayStation Blog interview.

He also appears to suggest that despite being a wholly original story, the movie is set within the same universe as the games or at least has been made in such a way that it could be canon.

‘I would rather just kind of celebrate everything I love about the games by telling the story that could exist on the sidelines of one of the games,’ explains Cregger, with his movie specifically taking place in ‘the world of [Resident Evil] 2’ and its setting of Raccoon City.

Whether this means characters from that game, like Leon or Claire, will pop up is another question entirely, but Cregger’s vague outline of the movie does make it sound like a classic Resident Evil game: ‘It’s just following a different person who’s on a mission in this horrible night when things are going wrong in Raccoon City, and they’ve got to get something from point A to point B.

‘And as they go, they encounter all of the same sorts of things you would encounter in the games. I wanted to keep true to like [in the games], you start with a pistol, you graduate to a shotgun, and then eventually you find an MP5.’

At the very least, the movie looks to be in safe hands. Cregger is not only a skilled director, but a big fan of the Resident Evil games – although not to the point where he’s compelled to fill his movie with memberberries.

Given how Street Fighter looks, we would’ve thought Capcom would want a new Resident Evil movie to be as authentic to the games as possible, in terms of recognisable characters and motifs, but Cregger’s auteur status seems to have earned him a lot of leeway.

Plus, Capcom tried that style once before, with the 2021 Resident Evil movie, which was deemed a critical and commercial failure despite being a loose adaptation of the first two games and featuring numerous iconic characters.

By comparison, the original stretch of live action Resident Evil movies, directed by Paul W. S. Anderson, were far more profitable, but they barely resembled the source material and were mostly awful.

With any luck, Cregger’s effort will be the first genuinely good live action adaptation of Resident Evil and it’ll be interesting to see how it performs compared to the Street Fighter movie.

In related news, Fallout alternative Atomfall is now getting a TV show following its BAFTA win earlier this month, where it was voted Best British Game of 2025.

According to Deadline, developer Rebellion is teaming up with Two Brothers Pictures on the project, another British company responsible for producing award winning shows like Fleabag and The Tourist.

Atomfall is published and developed by British company Rebellion, who own the rights to 2000 AD. As such they’re also making an animated movie based on Rogue Trooper, which many will know from the video game adaptation.

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.

Comments


Add as preferred source