Resident Evil movie director compares Austin Abrams' everyman hero to Frodo heading into Mordor

Zach Cregger — the director behind Barbarian and Weapons — has opened up about his upcoming Resident Evil film, and the pitch is simple: follow a helpless nobody through a nightmare. Speaking to Empire, Cregger described protagonist Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, as an "idiot" — not in the sense of being stupid, but in that he has zero combat skills and no survival instincts whatsoever. The Frodo comparison came straight from Cregger himself: "It's kind of like Frodo going into Mordor."

Bryan is a medical courier — an everyman dragged into a sacred, deadly mission that pulls him into the heart of the Resident Evil world. Cregger says the film kicks into gear roughly five minutes in and barely lets up until the credits roll. "It feels like one gigantic sequence," he told Empire. "Things pop off about five minutes in and it basically stays like that until the end." He's also leaning hard on the games' structure — moving from set-piece to set-piece, each location throwing a distinct challenge at the player, or in this case, the audience. "I'm borrowing from the games directly in that rhythm, where you're just running through a gauntlet."

The film doesn't adapt any specific game's story and features none of the franchise's established characters, which has frustrated some fans. Cregger has addressed this repeatedly, insisting he's a genuine fan of the series and wants to capture its tone while making something distinctly his own. "It's really a Zach Cregger movie that just happens to be a Resident Evil movie," he said. He reportedly had full creative freedom to reinvent the film franchise from scratch — a significant departure from the Paul W.S. Anderson era, which ran for six films and grossed over $1 billion at the box office combined.

The Resident Evil movie hits theaters on September 18. It won't be the only video game adaptation landing this fall — the Street Fighter movie follows on October 16.