Resident Evil Director Zach Cregger Reveals Original Ending Change

Director Zach Cregger revealed that his hit film Resident Evil nearly featured a much bleaker conclusion, according to an interview with Collider. The survival horror adaptation, which had a $108 million opening at the box office and surpassed Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as Rotten Tomatoes’ highest-rated video game adaptation, originally jettisoned its primary narrative cure much earlier in the finale. The Contingency Plan That Saved the Ending

In the theatrical release, Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a medical courier desperately transporting a T-Virus cure through an Umbrella Corporation laboratory. As Bryan succumbs to the virus, he fights his own mutations while trying to reach the cure, maintaining an emotional connection for the audience. According to director Zach Cregger in Collider, this tension was almost entirely absent in early script drafts. One of the missteps I made early on was not doing that, Cregger told Collider. And so we reorganized the chain of events. Thank God, I shot this as a contingency plan. It was like my plan B. In the original script, a scientist pulls the needle out, and Bryan immediately drops and shatters the cure while grabbing a woman’s face. The rest of the sequence originally devolved into a straightforward slaughter. Then the rest of the movie is just Austin killing the scientists, and people were just like, ‘No, like it’s over’, you know, Cregger explained to Collider. Sensing the narrative dead end, the Barbarian and Weapons filmmaker shot a contingency sequence in Prague showing a scientist pocketing the needle and Bryan’s desperate final stab. That alternative footage ultimately preserved the movie’s high-stakes momentum, transforming the audience reaction from kill them all to save him, save him. Approaching a Beloved Video Game Franchise

According to an interview with Empire, Cregger actively pursued the rights to adapt Capcom’s survival horror franchise rather than waiting for studios to pitch him intellectual property. They were kind enough to hear me out and let me run with it, Cregger told Empire. It’s really a Zach Cregger movie that just happens to be a Resident Evil movie. Rather than casting a traditional action hero, Cregger modeled protagonist Bryan after an everyday outsider navigating an impossible gauntlet. The concept here is that we’re following an idiot, Cregger told Empire, clarifying that Bryan lacks standard combat skills and acts as an audience surrogate akin to Frodo entering Mordor. Production details surrounding Bryan’s frantic journey through Raccoon City note that the character’s infection by a child early in the runtime establishes an inescapable clock on his survival. Despite the extensive alternate cuts shot during production, Cregger confirmed to Collider that audiences should not expect an alternate Cregger Cut of Resident Evil to be released in the future.