Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil movie is finally here, and it’s pretty damn great — a first for a franchise full of bad adaptations. Its strong reviews have made it the highest-rated video game movie ever, and it made bank at the box office in its opening weekend.
Critics and audiences agree Resident Evil is great from beginning to end, but the ending we saw in theaters wasn’t the original vision the director had for the film’s conclusion. In a new interview, Cregger revealed how he changed the film’s ending, ultimately making it better.
[Ed. note: Spoilers for the Resident Evil movie’s ending follow.]
Zach Cregger made a major change to his original Resident Evil finale
Resident Evil follows medical courier Brian (Austin Abrams) trying to survive a zombie outbreak. He’s tasked with delivering a key ingredient to an antidote for the T-Virus, and his quest gets mighty personal stakes when Brian himself is infected about halfway through the movie. Just as he finds the scientists working on a cure, the T-Virus begins to mutate Brian, turning him into a grotesque monster. He still retains some humanity, however, as Brian pleads with the scientists to inject him with the cure… as he kills them one by one. It’s a tragic sequence made all the more devastating as the audience knows that a part of the Brian they just spent 90 minutes getting to know is still in that tentacled, teeth-filled monster he’s becoming.
Speaking with Collider, Cregger and Abrams discussed how the original ending saw the cure get destroyed much earlier in the final sequence, and how Brian would have gone full-on monster. “Originally in the script, that scientist pulls the needle out, and as soon as Austin [Brian] grabs the woman’s face, he drops it, and it shatters,” Cregger said. “Then the rest of the movie is just Austin [Brian] killing the scientists, and people were just like, ‘No, it’s over.'”
Cregger called Brian quickly losing his humanity “one of the missteps” he made. “So we reorganized the chain of events,” he said. “Thank God I shot for this as a contingency plan. It was like my plan B.” By filming a shot of the last remaining scientist slipping the cure into his pocket, the team was able to alter the sequence of events that play out in the film’s closing minutes.
“I shot a contingency of [the scientist] 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, I guess? Kill them all.'” Keeping Brian focused on obtaining the cure allows the audience to be on his side up until the credits roll, making Resident Evil quite the tragedy.
While Cregger viewed Resident Evil as a one-and-done, he does have ideas about where a potential sequel could go. “I’ve already got other ideas of what could happen. But my next movie is already kind of in place here, and it’s not a Resident Evil movie — I’m gonna go make something else. But on the other side of that, who knows? Who can say? Anything could happen,” he recently told Polygon.