Resident Evil keeps coming back from the dead

Cheat Sheet: How Resident Evil rebooted a zombie craze to become a billion dollar franchise Welcome to Cheat Sheet, where we give you all the intel you need about iconic shows and films. In honour of its new addition, this time we're looking at the beloved zombie game and film franchise Resident Evil. After 30 years of rabid zombies and massive profits, the Resident Evil franchise is ready to infect cinemas once more. With nine main series numbered video games, dozens of spin-off games, six movies, plenty of novels and comic books, and even a couple of stage plays to its name, the franchise has grossed nearly $US13 billion across all media. The horror survival franchise is about to get another face lift thanks to Weapons director Zach Cregger, who is at the helm of the upcoming feature film. Here's what you need to know. The history of Resident Evil Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami was unsure when his mentor, Japanese video game giant Capcom's Tokuro Fujiwara, asked him to make a new game based on the 1989 game Sweet Home. He worried that a horror-heavy game would not sell well, and he was very easily frightened. "If he'd answered that he never got scared, I couldn't have trusted him with the project," Fujiwara said in 2003. "People who aren't afraid of anything don't understand what's frightening. In my view, you can't make a horror game if you don't have any fear." Fujiwara and Mikami set out to create a new kind of horror video game, incorporating an inventory system with scarce resources, a vitals monitoring system instead of a standard health bar, and a heavy emphasis on scares and gore in more cinematic cut-scenes. "I thought about how exhilarating it was to take down a zombie and about how that was a feeling that you just couldn't get from watching a movie," Mikami told Gamespot in 2016. "That was the first time that I really sensed that we had a new genre on our hands." Inspired visually by The Shining and Dawn of the Dead, the original Resident Evil plot is simple: after a series of gruesome murders in Raccoon City, a team of operatives is sent into an abandoned mansion to track down the source. From there, players must conserve and combine resources while avoiding the zombies and other monsters who will attack on sight. Released in Japan in March 1996 as Biohazard, the English version had to be renamed over fears that Biohazard would be too hard to copyright. So the game was rechristened Resident Evil outside of its homeland. Mikami coined a new phrase to promote the game's release — survival horror — which has now grown to a sizeable sub-genre of video games. By December 1996, Resident Evil had sold more than 4 million copies, becoming PlayStation's highest-grossing title at the time. The game franchise would go on to spawn 11 more direct sequels, including 2026's Resident Evil Requiem. The impact of Resident Evil With roots in classic zombie movies and an emphasis on storytelling over combat, it was only a matter of time before Resident Evil infected cinema. In a 2015 interview, writer Alex Garland pointed to Resident Evil's relentless zombies as inspiration for the fast-moving terrors in the 2002 film 28 Days Later, which he wrote. "Sometimes 28 Days Later is credited with reviving the zombie genre in some respect, but actually, I think it was Resident Evil that did it because I remember playing Resident Evil, having not really encountered zombies for quite a while, and thinking: oh, my god, I love zombies!" he said. The zombie movie revival of the 2000s and early 2010s saw the release of other familiar undead fare: 2004's Dawn of the Dead remake; Spanish-language Rec (2007) (as well as its 2008 US remake, Quarantine); and World War Z (2013). It was only natural Resident Evil would want to get in on the trend it had started. Released in 2002, the first Resident Evil feature film introduced protagonist Alice (Milla Jovovich) and established a story continuity separate from the games. Despite being panned by critics for being formulaic, Resident Evil (2002) grossed $US109 million on a $US33 million budget. Enough to pave the way for five more editions in the same narrative starring Jovovich: Apocalypse (2004), Extinction (2007), Afterlife (2010), Retribution (2012), and The Final Chapter (2016). The original iteration grossed more than $US1.2 billion, before receiving a cinematic reboot with 2021's Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. What is Zach Cregger's Resident Evil about? After Welcome to Raccoon City's lacklustre critical and box office performance, a planned sequel was shelved. In early 2025, it was announced that Weapons and Barbarian director Zach Cregger would reboot Resident Evil for the second time in a decade. Cregger says his Resident Evil is a love letter to the games. "[Resident Evil] is part of a visual touchstone that people, I think, my age and younger have inherited from games. We are the first generation to be informed as much by games as we have been by movies and television," Cregger told ABC News. "That really immersive sense of perspective comes from gaming, and Resident Evil definitely is one of the flagships of this." Instead of picking up an established storyline or characters from the franchise, Cregger's version follows medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) as he traverses Raccoon City and its outskirts, trying to fulfil his delivery. "[Bryan] is the guy that is playing the games, maybe even playing the games for the first time, so he's really trying to figure out how everything works, you know, how to shoot, how to load his weapons," Abrams told ABC News. Cregger brought several visual references from the games into his cinematic vision, including over-the-shoulder shots, the meticulous collection of bullets and resources, as well as the game's trademark typewriter save points. "I really needed to get the right typewriter on that desk. If I got like a bad-looking typewriter, I knew I was going to be cooked," Cregger says. "We actually re-shot that scene because I just wanted to get it exactly right." Ultimately, Cregger hopes that his edition will nail the vibes that saw Resident Evil attract its legions of fans in the first place: a fun, action-packed ride with some ultra-gory scares. "Resident Evil has always kind of embraced a little bit of camp, so there's a little bit of that, but it's really horror-forward," he says. "I knew if I got the tone wrong, there's no coming back from that." Resident Evil is in cinemas now.