The New Resident Evil Movie Has No Leon, No Jill, and No Chris. It's Also the Best One Yet.

Two Things You Probably Care About Most

First, this film's relationship to the Resident Evil games is roughly the same as your relationship to your online gaming handle: same name, vaguely similar soul, but the things you actually do are completely different. Leon, Claire, Jill, Chris. None of them show up. The protagonist is a medical courier named Bryan.

Second, the mainland Chinese theatrical version is censored, but not as badly as you might fear. The overseas runtime is 93 minutes 42 seconds. The mainland version is 93 minutes 1 second. Of that missing 40 seconds, more than 20 seconds is the Sony Columbia Pictures logo animation. This is a bought-out title, not a revenue-sharing release, so the mainland distributor bought the source directly from Constantin Film and released it themselves. That means Sony's opening logo, the Statue of Liberty sequence, is gone. The actual cuts amount to about 10 seconds, mostly quick cuts and blurring on a few close-up shots. I'll list the specific spots at the end.

Who Is Zach Cregger, and Why Did Constantin Hire Him?

Paul W. S. Anderson's six-film series saw its Douban score slide from 8.3 all the way down to 6.4. Then came 2021's Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which stuffed the characters from the first two games into one movie: Jill, Chris, Claire, Leon, Wesker, William Birkin. Everyone. The result: 4.6 on Douban, 28% on Rotten Tomatoes. Too many characters, none of them standing up. Leon was practically useless.

Constantin Film had big plans. That reboot was supposed to be the first step in a Resident Evil universe: a Veronica movie, a Resident Evil 4 adaptation, and a TV series based on Resident Evil 7 and Village. Scripts were written. Then Welcome to Raccoon City bombed critically and commercially, earning only $41.9 million worldwide. All those plans evaporated.

So they went to Zach Cregger.

What had Cregger done before? Barbarian, made for $4.5 million, grossed $45 million worldwide. Weapons, made for $38 million, grossed $270 million. Two horror films, both above 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. He had publicly said he only made original stories, that he didn't touch IP or sequels.

Then he added a caveat: Resident Evil was the exception.

He's a fan of the games. He never even finished the old live-action movies. Constantin gave him absolute creative autonomy. Sony took distribution. PlayStation Productions and Vertigo Entertainment co-invested. Production budget: around $20 million.

The first thing Cregger did after taking the job: he refused to use any classic characters from the games.

His exact words: "This is an original story set in the Resident Evil universe. No characters from the games will appear." The timeline is set early in Resident Evil 2, during the initial outbreak in Raccoon City. Somewhere off to the side, while Leon and Claire are dealing with their own nightmare, a courier is just trying to deliver a package.

He even predicted fan backlash. In a BBC interview, he said it was impossible to satisfy everyone. Even if he adapted a specific game's plot, fans would still be disappointed, "because I would inevitably screw something up somewhere."

What the Film Is Actually Doing

Cregger isn't adapting the plot of a game. He's adapting the experience of playing one.

The first twenty minutes: Bryan gets a job, delivers a package to a remote hospital in Raccoon City. Then the city collapses. He knows nothing. There's no tutorial mode. The game starts on expert difficulty.

The rest of the film follows a game-logic structure: leave the starting area (the hospital), encounter the first monster, acquire a weapon (pistol), find a safe room (something like Left 4 Dead), restock ammo, meet a stronger enemy, pick up a shotgun, run into NPCs (the opening cop, the two security guards in the middle, the researchers at the end. That's it, three NPC encounters total), enter the final stage (the lab), face the boss.

Almost no dialogue drives the plot. Bryan talks to himself, complains, panics, keeps moving. It's like watching a streamer play a horror game. The streamer has to keep talking, or it gets boring. Cregger takes that "playing and chatting" experience and puts it directly into the film.

One Reddit player put it well: "He didn't make a Resident Evil movie. He made a movie about a young guy who accidentally wanders into a Resident Evil game world, dodging monsters, getting wrecked by puzzles, absolutely losing his mind. Yeah. That's the first Resident Evil we all played."

Bryan

Bryan is timid, rule-following, and only knows how to deliver packages and get signatures. His professional habit: no matter what happens, the package has to arrive.

Cregger used the same character strategy in Barbarian and Weapons: ordinary people with flaws. In Barbarian, it's a woman looking for a job. In Weapons, it's an elementary school teacher hounded by rumors.

There's a screenwriting principle at work here: character design runs inverse to plot direction. The more cowardly Bryan is, the more afraid he is of delaying the delivery, and the more determined he becomes to finish the job. The more cowardly he is, the more believable his reactions to supernatural events feel. Many of his critical misjudgments come precisely from having zero experience with this kind of situation.

And because he's a coward, he's wary of anything abnormal. That wariness accidentally helps him survive. He doesn't live because he's brave. He lives because he's scared.

Bryan is also a talker. A one-man stand-up routine. He mutters when he's scared, mocks himself when he's nervous, complains when he sees monsters. This adds black humor to the horror. But Cregger revealed that at a test screening, audiences laughed a little too much. So he cut all the jokes. He didn't want "funny and scary." He wanted pure horror.

That also says something about his attitude toward the IP: this is Resident Evil, not his personal style show.

Monsters and Gore

Most of the monsters are original. The "human spore" that keeps following Bryan has shades of Nemesis from Resident Evil 3. You can't kill it, you can't lose it. The multi-body fusion idea has precedents in Neill Blomkamp's short Zygote and 2023's Evil Dead Rise.

This is a splatter film. Visual spectacle first. Blood, fluids, guts flying. One critic called it a "gore film" more than anything else. The jump scares are concentrated in the first act. After that, it's more about disgusting, visceral imagery.

Ending Controversy

The theatrical ending: Bryan fights his way to the lab with the antidote, but his body is already infected. In the lab, he gradually mutates, eventually loses control, and kills all the scientists who could have saved him. The syringe containing the vaccine falls from the 28th floor. The last shot is a fully transformed Bryan roaring at an approaching National Guard helicopter before the screen cuts to black.

Some viewers called it "forced conflict." Others felt that because Bryan is so decent and brave, the contrast at the end is striking. "A heavy sense of fate's cruelty, almost tragic."

Cregger revealed that the original ending was even darker. In the first version, the antidote syringe shatters when the first researcher is attacked by the mutated Bryan. Bryan loses all hope and mutates. But Cregger felt that once the antidote is destroyed too early, the rest becomes Bryan simply killing scientists one by one. The audience would feel "the story is already over" and stop caring. So he changed it, using alternate shots to rebuild tension and letting Bryan fully mutate only at the very last moment.

That adjustment turns the film's narrative spine into a "monster origin" story. Bryan's arc, from ordinary man to monster, is the protagonist.

Why the Reception Is Split

Overseas, the reviews are strong. 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, 81 on Metacritic, 7.8 on IMDb. North American opening weekend: $60 million. Global first week: $108.3 million. Best opening in the series' 24-year history.

On Douban, the score is much lower. Negative reviews focus on two things. First, the film's weak connection to the games, with accusations that it's "using the IP to tell a different story." Second, questions about plot logic and character behavior. The protagonist "sees a monster and doesn't run, just stands there watching," "knows it's urgent but still dawdles." Some call it dumbed down.

This split reflects different expectations. Overseas player communities, especially people who actually played the games, are more likely to click with the film's restoration of that "game feel." They see a story about an ordinary guy who stumbles into a Resident Evil game world. Some mainland viewers, by contrast, went in expecting "a Resident Evil movie," found that the protagonist wasn't Leon or Jill, and that the plot didn't follow game canon, and felt let down.

One Reddit player who'd followed the whole series wrote: "Bryan is absolutely one of the top characters in the entire franchise. Not just in this movie. If he were in a game, same thing. I enjoyed every second he was on screen."

Another put it more emotionally: "When the protagonist sees something wrong, something terrifying, knows he has to go there anyway, and just mutters 'Come on, man…' I've felt that in so many Resident Evil games."

Cuts

Overseas runtime: 93 minutes 42 seconds. Mainland version: 93 minutes 1 second. Of the missing 40 seconds, more than 20 is the Sony logo. The actual cuts are about 10 seconds:

• The "human spore" first fusion: the close-up of the old couple's heads merging with tentacles is not cut, but blurred.

• Bryan meets the little girl, who suddenly mutates. The "blooming" close-up of her face is cut. The subsequent bite is shown more vaguely.

• In the sewer, Bryan meets the "Baron Harkonnen" figure. The close-up of the belly bursting and rats pouring out is trimmed.

• In the delivery room, Bryan encounters the "demon pill." After it explodes, a "Nezha" pops out. In the overseas version, the little creature shows half its face. In the mainland version, it seems to cut away as soon as it appears.

Everything else, organs, blood spray, frontal monster shots, is intact. The cuts target quick close-ups, not narrative coherence.

In the Context of the Series

Paul W. S. Anderson's six films borrowed the games' names and characters but were really an Alice show. 2021's Welcome to Raccoon City tried to return to the games, stuffing in characters and locations from the first two entries. It proved that "faithful to the game" does not equal "good."

Outbreak Night takes a third path. It doesn't tell the story of any game character. It tells the story of what it feels like to play the game.

The series kept failing on quality, not faithfulness. Outbreak Night proves something: when you find a director who understands both games and film, give him enough creative freedom, and let him capture the experience of playing rather than the plot of the game, a game adaptation can be both good and satisfying to players.

Should You Watch It?

If you're a game player, especially someone who loves the early survival horror atmosphere of Resident Evil or the co-op survival feel of Left 4 Dead, yes. If you can accept splatter, monster design, and black humor, yes. If you don't mind that it's "using the IP to tell a different story" and are willing to treat it as an original survival horror film set in the Resident Evil universe, yes.

If you're a loyal fan of the original plots and characters and want to see Leon, Claire, or Jill's story, no. If you're strict about plot logic, no. If you have a low tolerance for blood and disgusting imagery, no.

Cregger himself put it plainly: "I completely understand that fans have wanted to see Leon's story adapted for a long time. I'm sorry. But I didn't take this IP to get a budget. This is a Resident Evil story made from the heart."

This may not be the Resident Evil movie some people think should exist. But it proves something: sometimes the most respectful way to treat an IP is to not touch its most precious parts. The characters' stories stay in the games. What a film can do is let you feel again what it was like to sit in front of a screen, palms sweating, not knowing if you'd survive the next corner.

That feeling might be the soul of Resident Evil.