The Only Resident Evil You Need Before Friday
This Friday, September 18, Resident Evil opens in theaters, and if you have a few evenings before then, spend them in one building: the Raccoon City Police Department, in the 2019 remake of Resident Evil 2. Skip the 1998 original. Skip Resident Evil Requiem, the fastest-selling game in the series' history. And skip every one of the seven live-action films that came before this one. Everything else can wait until after the credits.
The reason is where the film is set. Zach Cregger's film adapts no game at all. It follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier making a delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital when an outbreak forces him to fight for survival, with Zach Cherry and Paul Walter Hauser as Umbrella scientists and Kali Reis as an Umbrella enforcer. It is an original story, but it has an address. Cregger told the PlayStation Blog in April: "So the world of [Resident Evil] 2 is kind of where this takes place, even though I'd make a couple of little shifts for dramatic license." One of those shifts is the calendar: the film is set in a modern era rather than in 1998. Its events run parallel to the game's, in a city and an outbreak the game already built.
The same outbreak, from another street
Fans who wanted Leon S. Kennedy on the big screen got a remedy in the same interview: "They can play the game." Take him literally. The 2019 remake of Resident Evil 2 begins on the night of September 29, 1998, with a rookie cop making his way toward Raccoon City to start his first shift. Cregger's film sends a courier into the same city with a package to deliver. Neither of them knows yet what the city has turned into. The game hands you Leon's night, and the film runs Bryan's alongside it.
Bryan is also built to be you. As Cregger told the PlayStation Blog: "Austin is very much like an avatar for me, or what I expect the average video game player would react if they were thrust into the game themselves." He is blunt about the character's skills, too: "He's not particularly good at combat in any way, shape, or form." Play the remake first and you arrive on Friday having already been that person: backing down a corridor, flashlight shaking, doing sums about bullets.
The sums matter most. Cregger thinks he played Resident Evil 2 before he ever touched the 1996 original, and what hooked him was the arithmetic. In his words: "I just loved this new mechanic of resource conservation. You had to be completely aware of how many bullets you had, and how many healing items you had." He rebuilt that economy for the film, where "you start with a pistol, you graduate to a shotgun, and then eventually you find an MP5." That is why the campaign to play is Leon's. Both leads carry a handgun, but Leon's arsenal adds the shotgun, while Claire Redfield's run swaps in a grenade launcher and a submachine gun. Squeeze your finds into an eight-slot inventory, ration the healing items, and when Bryan hesitates before pulling a trigger on Friday, you will know exactly why.
Where Bryan's night is happening
Why not the 1998 original?
This is where purists will want a word, and they have a point. The 1998 game is the one Cregger played first, the source of his earliest memory of the series. He told the PlayStation Blog: "My earliest memory of Resident Evil had to be playing [Resident Evil] 2." If his film is a love letter to anything, it is to that disc.
Now look at how the film is shot. The original Resident Evil 2 used tank controls, with its characters moving over pre-rendered backgrounds seen from fixed camera angles. The remake threw that out for a free camera over the character's shoulder. Cregger told The Hollywood Reporter, as quoted by The A.V. Club on Thursday, September 10: "I tend to think that the third-person perspective that the games utilize is wildly effective, and so that ended up being the movie's predominant visual language." He mixes in first-person and objective shots too, calling it "a moment-by-moment thing." But the view his film leans on is the one the remake plays in, from behind the hero's shoulder, not a fixed corner of a room from 1998.
The remake keeps what Cregger loved about the original, the scarcity: healing items, ammunition and key items all have to be scavenged, and the inventory is never as big as you want it to be. It also has the Tyrant known as Mr. X, who cannot be killed, only momentarily brought down or stunned, and who follows you through the station everywhere except the safe rooms. For this week's purposes, skipping the older game mostly costs you the tank controls. Nobody needs to warm up for a movie with those.
Why not Requiem?
Resident Evil Requiem is the fresh one, and the tempting one. It came out on February 27 and sold five million copies in five days. It is also the wrong game for this week. Requiem is set 28 years after the destruction of Raccoon City and follows FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft as she investigates mysterious deaths among the survivors of that night, with Leon as her co-lead: the very story Cregger has left to the games. Playing it before Friday means starting with the aftermath, when the film is about the outbreak itself.
There is a real case for Grace, though. When the PlayStation Blog asked whether Bryan follows the tradition of Ethan Winters, from Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village, and Grace, ordinary people dropped into a world they do not understand, Cregger's answer amounted to yes: "He's just a good natured, hapless dude who gets sucked into a nightmare." So play Requiem after, and meet Bryan's closest relative in the games.
The same goes for Resident Evil 4. Cregger calls it "probably the game I played the most," and he says he took its healing items and "mimicked them exactly" for the film. That makes it an Easter egg hunt for after the film. Spot them on Friday, then play the 2023 remake to check your work.
And the films? Skip every one
Here is the claim that will cost us some friends. You do not need the 2002 film or the five sequels that followed it with Milla Jovovich as Alice. You do not need Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City either. Cregger said in September 2025 that he had never seen any of the previous Resident Evil movies. If the director skipped that homework, so can you.
The Paul W. S. Anderson films are their own animal. Alice is an amnesiac heroine created for the movies, and the first one plays out in the Hive, an Umbrella lab beneath Raccoon City. The series has its defenders, a cult following among a distinct subset of reviewers, but most critics were unkind. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus on the 2002 film calls it "loud, violent, formulaic, and cheesy." In 2021 Johannes Roberts tried the opposite, adapting the first two games with Leon and Claire on screen, and the consensus called Welcome to Raccoon City "an affectionately faithful adaptation that further proves its source material is ill-suited to the big screen."
Seven live-action films, and none has scored higher than 38 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Anderson invented his own heroine, Roberts adapted the games' plots, and critics shrugged at both. Cregger is trying a third route: leave the stories alone and copy what it feels like to play.
Can this be the first good one?
Nobody knows yet, and anyone who says otherwise has seen 30 minutes of it. That is exactly what Sony screened for press, and the reactions that landed on Wednesday, September 2 were loud. JoBlo's JimmyO called it "one of the best set ups to a horror flick I've seen in a while," and Tyler Disney wrote that "Zach Cregger puts you straight into the world." One viewer quoted by NME admitted: "I was fully prepared to roast Resident Evil but the opening 30 minutes shut me up completely. Zero hand-holding. Filthy, brutal atmosphere." Another promised "one of the most genius jump scares of the year." Nick L'Barrow pointed out that the footage ended before the story had even reached Raccoon City.
Then there are the laughs. Joey Magidson found the footage "Surprisingly funny!" and added: "Felt very Barbarian, Zach Cregger wise." Cregger came up in sketch comedy with The Whitest Kids U' Know before Barbarian and Weapons made him a horror director, and he has now told The Hollywood Reporter that his test screenings showed "people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny," so "I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible." He says "there's not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss," and his rule is a good one: "A little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie."
We lean hopeful. Barbarian and Weapons scored 92 and 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, Abrams already worked with Cregger on Weapons, and his plan avoids both routes the earlier films took. But a great first half hour proves the setup, and the verdict lives in the hour after it. The film has its world premiere at Fantastic Fest on Thursday, September 17, one day before it opens in theaters. Until then, the smartest thing a fan can do is spend a night in the police station, so that on Friday you know the city before Bryan does.
