Resident Evil’s Movie Franchise Seemed Finished After Years of Misfires, but Zach Cregger Had an Idea That Changed Everything

There’s one thing Resident Evil fans can agree on: Capcom’s franchise has been an absolute disaster in film and television. Most of its adaptations have been poor and have tarnished the enormous legacy the saga holds in the entertainment industry.

Constantin Films, which owns the film rights to the IP, had all but given up on Resident Evil. The plan was to stop making movies based on the franchise for the foreseeable future and just wait, hoping the right idea would eventually come along and bring it back to the big screen.

Then Zach Cregger, the director of Resident Evil, came along with an unexpected pitch that initially made Constantin Films executives hesitant. In the end, though, he convinced them to bring the saga back to cinemas sooner than they’d anticipated.

Constantin Films No Longer Wanted to Make Resident Evil Movies

Many Resident Evil movies were an absolute mess, yet several of them were still resounding successes at the international box office. Even the most recent Netflix series performed well, despite the harsh criticism it received from fans. The problem was that fans had begun to lose confidence in new projects, making any adaptation of the IP an increasingly risky proposition.

With such a troubled track record in cinemas and the difficulty of pulling off new adaptations, Constantin Films decided to shelve Resident Evil entirely and put a stop to any film project tied to its universe.

In a recent interview on The Town with Matt Belloni podcast (via GameSpot), Oliver Berben, CEO of Constantin Films, explained that the box office failure of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City forced the company to reconsider its approach to Capcom’s IP. The idea was to let it rest and wait a good while before approving anything new.

Everything changed when Zach Cregger came forward with a proposal as he is a huge video game fan who knows the franchise inside and out. Interestingly, he was unfamiliar with Paul W. S. Anderson’s films starring Milla Jovovich.

According to Berben, Cregger was the one who approached Constantin Films to ask if he could work with Resident Evil, right when the company had decided to hit pause on the franchise. Berben already knew the filmmaker, and he was taken aback by his interest in the saga.

“Zach Cregger actually approached us, together with Roy Lee (a producer on Cregger’s movies). He basically came to us, and asked if this franchise, if this IP, was available. And it was really strange because at that time, first of all, we were in that situation that we said, ‘Okay, we’re going to leave it alone. We’re going to need to find a completely new way on how to adapt this for the future.’ And on the other hand, Zach, just only came out of Barbarian,” he said.

Zach Cregger’s Idea Made Resident Evil Possible

After talking with the filmmaker, Oliver Berben was convinced he was the right person to take the reins of Resident Evil and finally do it justice on the big screen. Cregger pitched his project to Robert Kulzer, co-president of Constantin Films, who was equally blown away by one idea in particular: telling the story of an ordinary person instead of focusing on the saga’s iconic characters.

“He came to the table and he had this idea. In his head, he knew exactly what he wanted, and he presented it to (Constantin Films co-president) Robert Kulzer in a cafe in Beverly Hills. And he knew the whole movie. He knew everything he wanted to do, and it was so different from everything we had done so far that we started digging into it,” Berben explained.

The company also trusted the filmmaker’s vision because it knew he was a devoted video game fan. In this way, Cregger’s passion for Resident Evil helped make the new movie possible as well.

“It was more moody, more like the game. He’s a gamer, he loved playing the games. So he came to this from a completely new direction,” he stated.

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