Zack Cregger Didn’t Want His ‘Resident Evil’ Film To Be Too Funny

Some of my favorite film adaptations try to break new ground. Changes are made. Characters are enhanced (or created altogether). The source material is respected but not treated like some precious thing that can never be molded (or even broken a little). And to be fair, Hollywood spent plenty of time buying properties simply for the name and then doing whatever they wanted. Sometimes that resulted in gold; other times, it left fans angry that they didn’t get exactly what they’d already experienced in another form (and to be fair, it can sometimes be a mix of the two).

In the new Resident Evil film, Zack Cregger wanted to make an adaptation that did something different. He didn’t want to tell Leon Kennedy’s story, because that’s already been told in the games. Instead, he wanted to tell a story set in the Resident Evil world. A new entry in the franchise that wouldn’t end up as a carbon copy of one of the video games. Well, apparently, fans are not happy about that, and Cregger is trying to take that news in stride.

In a recent interview with THR, Cregger responded to fan backlash, noting that he probably won’t make another adaptation after this, which sucks, but is probably for the best. “I cannot be worried about whether I am pleasing enough of every spectrum of fandom. If I tried to please everybody, I’d end up pleasing nobody. That much is obvious,” he explained. “I just have to be okay with people voicing their opinion. I’m a grown-up. When I took this on, I understood what I was walking into. So it would be weird for me to act surprised or bent out of shape that the thing that was obviously going to happen is now happening.”

While he’s trying not to let the negative reactions online get to him too much, he has adjusted the film quite a bit because test audiences were not reacting well to one big aspect: the comedy. Cregger has his roots in sketch comedy, and his two other horror films, Barbarian and Weapons, absolutely have plenty of humor, dark or otherwise. And horror and humor can mix beautifully, as laughter can often help relieve you of a big scare, but audiences were not caring for it here, and Cregger listened.

“I learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny. So over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible,” Cregger noted. “I then found that not only did the audience enjoy the movie more, but I also liked the movie a lot more. A little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie, and there’s not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss.” There are so many horror stories (pun intended) about directors having to do test screenings, so I’m glad this at least left Cregger feeling good.

If this ends up being Cregger’s only franchise film, I understand. Hopefully, it doesn’t weigh too much on whatever he does next, because I think his other two original films that I have seen are fantastic (I have not seen Miss March and… likely won’t). He’s someone who should be given the benefit of the doubt, even if Resident Evil fans have been burned before.