Resident Evil almost ended far darker — Cregger shot the version we got only as a backup
Test audiences shut down the first version. Cregger told Collider he filmed the contingency shot on a hunch in Prague.
If you were expecting the latest Resident Evil (2026) film to go easy on the gore, you’ve lost the plot somewhere. Zach Cregger, who most recently directed Weapons, has put his own stamp on Capcom’s horror world — but he hasn’t just lifted a script from the old PlayStation games. This time, we’re not following Jill Valentine or Leon; instead, Cregger’s cooked up his own take, and it’s a bit of a ride.
The basics: you’ve got Austin Abrams playing Bryan, a medical courier, who is on a seemingly routine errand delivering something to the snow-buried hellscape of Raccoon City. Things go rapidly sideways. The storm’s the least of his issues — soon enough, there are gnarly monsters everywhere. He finds out from Paul Walter Hauser’s Paul (an Umbrella scientist, naturally) that these nasties are apparently thanks to some laboratory cock-up, and it turns out Bryan’s delivery might hold the key to a cure. No pressure.
Resident Evil (2026) opened in cinemas on 18 September and has been smashing it at the box office ever since.
The Virus Strikes Back
While Bryan is hacking, slashing and panicking his way through the chaos, there’s one detail he keeps quiet: he’s already been bitten, by a mutated little girl no less. So, as he pushes deeper into the crumbling hospital, this dodgy virus is slowly taking him down. Anyone who knows this franchise knows where that leads — things are not looking up for Bryan’s life expectancy.
Once he finally lurches into Umbrella’s secret underground lab (because it’s always a secret underground lab), the infection is winning. Bryan morphs into a nasty, tentacled monster and, in a last gasp of humanity, pleads with the terrified scientists to help him out with that cure he’s just delivered. But nothing’s that simple: as his brain slips away and the city collapses around them, the crucial syringe with the cure plummets into the ruins, out of anyone’s reach. Bryan and most of the hospital staff are now up to their necks in a full-blown body horror mess, and as the National Guard helicopters close in, his fate is left dangling — very much alive, very much monstrous, and not exactly saved.
The Ending That Wasn’t
It nearly went a different way, though. Cregger originally wanted to make things even bleaker. In his first version, Bryan transforms and lashes out, sending the newly made cure crashing to the floor where it shatters. That’s it — no chance, no tension, no glimmer of hope. Just carnage. In the end, this felt a bit much — both for him and for test audiences, apparently — so Cregger smartly shot an alternate ending as insurance. In the released film, the cure is still tantalisingly close, but just out of reach, so you’re left grinding your teeth instead of giving up entirely.
Here’s how Cregger explained the whole saga, laying out the bloody behind-the-scenes edits in pretty blunt detail during a chat with Collider:
‘One of the missteps I made early on was not doing that. And so we reorganized the chain of events. Thank God, I shot this as a contingency plan. It was like my plan B. [...] Originally in the script, that scientist pulls the needle out, and as soon as Austin grabs the woman’s face, he drops it, and it shatters. Then the rest of the movie is just Austin killing the scientists, and people were just like, "No, like it’s over," you know. But I shot that shot of the scientist putting the needle in his pocket just because I had a feeling. I was like, "I feel like I’m going to need that." [...] And so then we were able to build a new sequence of the end, and I shot a contingency of him going for the stab in Prague when we were doing our thing, as just like, "If I need it, I should just get it." Thank God, because that’s what we ended up using. It keeps the stakes all the way until the end. It’s like, "save him, save him." Whereas before it was just like "kill them all."’
Cregger’s fussing over the ending was worth it. The film’s been raking it in since its September debut, and according to the Barbarian director himself, all that attention means he’s very much open to a sequel — or even something bigger. With Umbrella’s reach spanning the globe in the games, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of mad science or zombie-infested property to visit next. If you’re hoping for Resident Evil 2 (the film, not the one with Mr X in a trench coat), it sounds like you’re not alone.
Read more: Cregger went into Resident Evil thinking one and done — now he says he can't help himself