Over the course of the past few decades, as online culture has evolved in tandem with technological leaps and societal shifts, something profoundly lousy has happened to the discourse between art, audiences, and artists. The internet has afforded wide-reaching platforms to anybody with an opinion and a care to share it, and many people have realized that they can actually monetize people's engagement with these opinions, thus giving them motivation to make those opinions all the more uniquely tailored to a certain kind of vitriolic audience.
All of this has resulted in fandoms becoming nigh unbearable to even begin to engage with in the modern age. When it comes to high-profile properties, seemingly no filmmaker is given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to anything resembling creative liberties, and they are instead chastised for trying to do anything other than repeat previous beats or cater directly to the conflicting-and-thus-ultimately-impossible-to-actually-satisfy demands of the ‘fanbase.’ We have, unfortunately, seen this time and again in recent years, but the latest example has been with Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil movie. And it turns out Cregger is understandably exhausted with the discourse surrounding the project, and has said he’s done stepping into established franchises. “I’m doing this, and that’s it for me.”
This is so insane on so many levels, that it’s difficult to even know where to begin with parsing this out.
Zach Cregger is one of the most in-demand and highly acclaimed genre filmmakers working today. He’s the writer-director of two of the most unanimously praised horror films of the last decade, in Barbarian and Weapons. Prior to Weapons even releasing, Cregger pitched a Resident Evil movie and incited a bidding war on said movie, because literally everyone wanted to be in the business of making a new Zach Cregger movie.
Notably, Resident Evil as a cinematic franchise has far more to gain from this than Cregger did. There was an entire run of Paul W.S. Anderson-helmed film adaptations across the ‘00s and 2010s, which saw decreasing returns and were never well-reviewed. Since then, there have been numerous other attempts (including a movie that flopped and a Netflix series that bombed), none of which did anything to get audiences even remotely interested in this property again. But between Cregger’s central hook for the film and his name being attached to it, the new Resident Evil has drummed up significant buzz and is already shaping up to be a box office smash.
Despite everything I just said, there’s a small but incredibly vocal subsection of franchise fans who have been driving an obscene amount of discourse online over the past few months, complaining that Cregger’s film is not being faithful to the source material. This belief seems to stem from the fact that Cregger cited the video game Resident Evil 2 as being a central inspiration to the film, and these individuals misinterpret that as meaning that he was just going to adapt that game to the big screen verbatim. That’s not what ‘inspiration’ means, and apparently these folks wanted to make their stupidity Cregger’s problem. Unfortunately, the discourse has been so loud that Cregger has had to field questions about in non-stop while doing press for the film, resulting in what he recently referred to as feeling like “an apology tour.”
So now, completely justifiably, he has zero interest in doing any other Resident Evil-related things or even any other franchise films, because the hassle of having to deal with this incessant discourse is simply not worth it. This sucks, and I think it's awful that Cregger has even had to waste his time with this, but I do love that he’s at least speaking up about it now. Watching interviews with him, where he’s clearly been instructed to attempt to manage this thing like some sort of PR crisis, has been painful, and I’m glad now that those initial box office projections are out, he’s comfortable just cutting loose.
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