‘Resident Evil’ Test Screenings Made Cregger Cut the Jokes
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil used to be funnier. Test audiences told him so, and he took the note.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the film’s September 18 release, the director said the screening process handed him a verdict he was not expecting.
I learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny. So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible.
Zach Cregger, to The Hollywood Reporter
The Funny Guy Problem
This is the most interesting thing Cregger has said about the movie, because humor is the exact thing his admirers worry about and the exact thing they love him for.
He came out of sketch comedy, and both Barbarian and Weapons use jokes structurally rather than decoratively. In Barbarian, the funniest stretch of the film is also the moment the dread resets and starts climbing again from zero. That instinct is a weapon in an original horror film.
It is a harder fit here. Resident Evil as a game series is not funny on purpose. It is airless. The tone is a locked room, a dwindling count of bullets and a save point you are not sure you will reach, and a laugh in the wrong place lets the pressure out of exactly the thing the adaptation is trying to reproduce.
Cregger appears to have arrived at the same conclusion by watching a room full of strangers arrive at it first.
A little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie, and there’s not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss.
Zach Cregger, to The Hollywood Reporter
What the Testing Did Not Do
Worth noting what Cregger did not say. He did not describe a studio forcing a recut. He framed it as his own decision, made gradually across a testing process, and said he ended up preferring the result.
Nobody has said how much came out, which scenes lost what, or whether the funnier assembly still exists in a usable form. Sony has announced no plans to release it. The comedy cut is, for now, a thing that happened in a screening room and then stopped existing.
What Is Actually in the Thing
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier whose shift runs him into the Raccoon City outbreak. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser fill out a deliberately small supporting cast. Cregger wrote the script with Shay Hatten, who handled the back half of the John Wick films and knows how to march a person through escalating rooms of trouble.
The story is original rather than a scene-for-scene port of any single game, running alongside the first T-virus outbreak instead of retelling it, and per Bloody Disgusting it moves the setting to the present day rather than the games’ nineties. Early listings put the runtime around ninety-five minutes, and the MPA rated it R for strong bloody violence, gore and language throughout. Columbia Pictures and Constantin Film produce in association with TriStar Pictures.
Tracking is pointing somewhere the franchise has never been. Industry projections reported this week put the domestic opening near $35 million, which would be the biggest debut any Resident Evil movie has managed, with global estimates running well past $100 million. Tracking is a forecast and not a result, and it has been wrong in both directions before.
Four Days Out
Sony screened the first thirty minutes for press and audiences on September 1, and the early word on that footage singled out the tension and, awkwardly enough, the jokes that were still in it.
Which is the part worth sitting with. A filmmaker whose comic timing is one of his best tools decided that tool was working against him, and cut it anyway. Video game adaptations have failed for a hundred reasons over thirty years. Taking the material too seriously has never once been one of them.
Resident Evil opens in theaters and IMAX on September 18, 2026.
