Zach Cregger Confirms His ‘Resident Evil’ Film Shares a Timeline With ‘Resident Evil 2’ — but the Trailer Tells a Different Story

Published May 1, 2026, 7:46 AM EDT

Hannah has been writing about horror, sci-fi, and all things nerdy since 2021. At Collider, she covers news and conducts interviews, along with contributing features that dive deep into genre storytelling and why it works. If there’s something lurking in the shadows, she’s probably already writing about it if she's not too busy watching a tape from her VHS collection.

That is exactly why the trailer for the Resident Evil reboot film hits as hard as it does. In even a short amount of time, it is tense without feeling rushed, controlled without losing intensity, and from the teaser trailer alone looks genuinely terrifying in a way that live-action Resident Evil has struggled to achieve and sustain beyond a handful of cool scenes. Zach Cregger, the director for the upcoming film, has proven with previous releases such as Barbarian and Weapons that he knows how to build dread and let it linger, and the trailer makes that clear. It also introduces an element that should not canonically be there, because it is snowing.

The Timeline Matches, but the Experience Does Not

Cregger has been clear about how he sees the film fitting into the larger Resident Evil timeline. To IGN, he described it as unfolding alongside the events of Resident Evil 2, during the same night the T-virus overtakes Raccoon City, which we already know is September 29. The upcoming film is not a retelling of the police station storyline. It is another character (Bryan, played by Weapons’ Austin Abrams), on another mission, moving toward the center of the outbreak while everything is falling apart. That framing alone is exciting because it expands the scope of the franchise’s story without rewriting it. It suggests a version of Raccoon City that exists beyond what any of the games have been able to show us, one where multiple stories are unfolding at once, each with their own stakes and perspective.

It also makes the snow impossible to ignore. Resident Evil 2 does not take place in winter. There is no version of Raccoon City in any iteration of Resident Evil 2 where the outbreak unfolds under a blanket of snow. So if this story exists on that same night, in the same city, the trailer is already bending the reality of that timeline in a visible, immediate way.

That Said, The Snow Could Be Part of What Makes ‘Resident Evil’ Work

With Cregger’s goal being to recreate the feeling of playing a Resident Evil game, the snow feels like an intentional choice rather than a mistake. Weather does a lot of work in horror, whether it is acknowledged or not. The games lean on darkness and rain to create pressure, to make every space feel active and unpredictable. Snow changes that equation. It slows everything down, dulls sound, and limits what you can see in a way that feels isolating. That shift lines up with how Cregger is describing the structure of the film. He also noted that the story follows Bryan outside of Raccoon City trying to push inward, moving through a series of escalating set pieces as he gets closer to the center of the outbreak. That kind of progression is different from being trapped in one location. That kind of setup lines up with what makes Cregger an interesting and fitting choice for this material in the first place: his work tends to sit in discomfort rather than rushing past it. If that carries over here, the change in weather is not pulling away from Resident Evil, it is just finding a different way to deliver the same kind of dread.

The Snow Is the Kind of Contradiction ‘Resident Evil’ Might Need

Live-action Resident Evil has historically struggled to feel like Resident Evil in a way that lasts, or in a way that particularly impresses either critics or audiences. The games are controlled, deliberate, terrifying, and often claustrophobic, built around the idea that survival comes from understanding your environment as much as reacting to it. The trailer suggests that Cregger understands that balance, and fans finally have a good live-action interpretation to look forward to when the film releases on September 18 later this year. It looks like a film built around tension instead of escalation, and it feels closer to the spirit of the games than most adaptations have managed, even in these early glimpses.

That is what makes the question of the weather and timeline more interesting than frustrating. Cregger says this story unfolds on the same night Raccoon City fell. The trailer makes it clear he is not interested in showing that night the same way players have seen it before. If anything, the differences point to a version of the story that is just as focused on how that night felt as the games were. If the film can deliver on that, if it can make this version of Raccoon City feel just as oppressive and unforgettable as the one players have carried with them for decades, then the snow stops being a contradiction. It becomes part of why live-action Resident Evil might finally work, even if that means Raccoon City freezes over instead of falling apart the way we remember.