How Resident Evil Made Zach Cregger the Director Jennifer Lawrence Trusts

Zach Cregger just made a Resident Evil movie work, and that sentence alone deserves a minute.

Hollywood has been trying to crack Resident Evil for more than two decades, usually by grabbing the monsters, Umbrella logos, zombies and assorted pieces of the games and assembling them into something that technically qualifies as Resident Evil.

Cregger came at the problem differently. Instead of asking how to recreate a particular game, he asked what it actually feels like to play one.

His new movie follows an ordinary medical courier into a nightmare, then recreates the rhythm of the games around him: limited resources, new environments, escalating threats and that familiar feeling that opening the next door is probably a terrible idea but you have to do it anyway.

Cregger has described himself as a lifelong fan of the Resident Evil games, even while admitting that he had never watched the previous Resident Evil movies before making his own.

That gamble worked.

Resident Evil opened with $60.2 million domestically, the biggest opening weekend in the franchise’s history, and crossed $100 million in North America on its tenth day of release. More importantly for Cregger, the movie has fueled a larger conversation about whether a faithful video-game adaptation needs to reproduce familiar characters and storylines, or whether it can be more faithful by recreating the experience of actually playing the game.

Which makes today’s news considerably more interesting: Jennifer Lawrence is joining Zach Cregger’s next movie.

And this time, there is no game to adapt.

Zach Cregger Figured Out What Resident Evil Actually Is

What Cregger did with Resident Evil says more about him than another successful opening weekend ever could.

He did not need Leon Kennedy. He did not need Claire Redfield. He did not need to recreate a famous cutscene so everybody could point at the screen and recognize it. Instead, he treated the games almost like a language and tried to translate that language into filmmaking.

Writing about Cregger’s adaptation, The Guardian argued that the movie’s unusual faithfulness comes from recreating the experience and mechanics of playing Resident Evil rather than simply reproducing familiar characters, locations and storylines.

That sounds obvious after somebody does it. It was not obvious before.

And it fits a pattern that has been developing throughout Cregger’s very strange career.

He Was a Comedy Guy Until He Suddenly Wasn’t

If Zach Cregger’s name still feels relatively new, there is a reason. He did not spend twenty years climbing through the horror world waiting for his turn.

He came from sketch comedy.

Cregger co-founded The Whitest Kids U’ Know with Trevor Moore and other friends he met while attending New York’s School of Visual Arts. The group performed for years before landing its television series, and Cregger spent much of his career acting in comedy and sitcoms.

Then came Barbarian, written and directed by Cregger and released theatrically in September 2022.

What made Barbarian memorable was not simply that it was scary. It was the feeling that the movie could completely change direction without asking permission. Cregger has said his comedy background taught him to think in exactly those terms: timing, surprise and zigging when an audience expects you to zag.

That may be the connecting tissue through everything he has made since.

He is not really changing genres as much as he is finding new ways to surprise people.

Then Weapons Proved Barbarian Wasn’t a Fluke

Weapons made the Cregger thing much clearer.

Once again, the movie withheld information, shifted perspectives and refused to explain itself on the audience’s preferred schedule. It was larger and more ambitious than Barbarian, but the same instinct was underneath it: let viewers become comfortable enough to think they understand the movie, then take the floor out from underneath them.

The film also came from a much more personal place. Cregger has discussed how grief following the death of his longtime friend and Whitest Kids U’ Know collaborator Trevor Moore influenced the period in which he wrote Weapons.

By the time Weapons landed, Cregger was no longer the comedy guy who unexpectedly made a horror movie.

He was Zach Cregger.

And somehow, that already meant something.

Resident Evil Was the Test

Original movies are one thing. A giant piece of intellectual property is another.

That is why Resident Evil feels important to where Cregger goes next.

There are a million ways a director can disappear inside a franchise. The logos get bigger, the expectations get louder, fans arrive with checklists and suddenly the person behind the camera is mostly there to make sure all the required pieces show up.

Cregger did the opposite.

He figured out what interested him about Resident Evil and made the franchise operate according to his instincts. Even reviewers who have been less enthusiastic about the movie itself have recognized his fingerprints all over it.

That is a much harder trick than making another Barbarian.

It means his voice survived the machine.

So what happens when you take away the franchise again?

Apparently, Jennifer Lawrence happens.

Jennifer Lawrence Is Going Into The Flood With Him

Lawrence has now signed on to lead The Flood, an original science-fiction film written, directed and produced by Cregger. Warner Bros. has scheduled the movie for August 11, 2028, with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Vertigo Entertainment producing.

The studio is keeping plot details largely under wraps, but Cregger has already given us a much clearer idea of what kind of movie The Flood will be. He has described it as science fiction rather than straight horror, although it contains horror and may be his most disturbing film yet. He has also called its narrative structure “bizarre,” while saying it does not simply repeat the perspective-shifting structures of Barbarian or Weapons. Entertainment Weekly additionally reports that the story is set in outer space and describes it as a more cerebral science-fiction project.

He has also called the script one of the projects he is most proud of and described its construction as having its own strange anatomy.

That suddenly makes Lawrence’s casting feel like more than the usual announcement that Famous Actor A will appear in Upcoming Movie B.

She is signing onto his movie.

Not Resident Evil. Not another established universe. Not something where Cregger is being handed the keys and asked not to scratch anything.

His weird space movie.

And after what he just did with Resident Evil, that sounds like exactly where he should be going.

Resident Evil Proved the Point

Cregger began in sketch comedy, made Barbarian, followed it with Weapons, walked directly into one of horror gaming’s biggest franchises and somehow decided the best way to honor Resident Evil was not to copy it.

Now he gets Jennifer Lawrence, Spielberg’s Amblin and a major Warner Bros. theatrical release for an original science-fiction movie.

That progression would sound ridiculous if it had taken twenty years.

It barely took five.

Maybe that is why The Flood suddenly became much more interesting today. Jennifer Lawrence is obviously a major addition, but she is not the reason I want to see it.

Resident Evil is.

Because Zach Cregger just proved that even when you hand him somebody else’s enormous franchise, he can still find the strange little door that leads to a Zach Cregger movie.

Now somebody has given him an original story, Jennifer Lawrence and outer space.

Open the door.