The Resident Evil movie ending, explained: the version in theaters was Cregger's backup — he shot the darker one first
Zach Cregger filmed an ending where the cure dies in the first minute of the climax. The one you saw exists because he kept a Plan B in his pocket in Prague.
Start with what's on screen, spoilers and all. Bryan (Austin Abrams), infected and running out of self, delivers the stabilizer to the Umbrella scientists on the hospital's top floor; his transformation takes hold, he kills them one by one while begging for the cure, and the last scientist dies on the building's exterior. The vial falls to the ground below, Bryan roars as a fully mutated thing, and the National Guard helicopters arrive at Raccoon City.
Bleak — and still the softer option. In the ending Cregger shot first, the syringe shatters in the opening seconds of the struggle, when Bryan grabs a scientist's face. Everything after that was just slaughter, with Bryan's transformation hidden in fog and shadow.
"Kill them, I guess? Kill them all?"
— Zach Cregger, describing the original ending's effect, in a Collider conversation
The fix, and where it came from
Cregger realized the problem in the edit, after the film had wrapped: with the antidote gone early and the hero invisible in the fog, the audience had nothing left to hope for. "I felt like we weren't seeing Austin enough in the fog," he said in the same conversation. "We miss our guy!"
Rebuilding the climax took two pieces. Bryan's full transformation was captured on an LA stage called Scanline — a dome of a thousand cameras that scans the performer in 3D — with the monster built in post.
The second piece had been sitting in the footage since Prague. Cregger had filmed the scientist pocketing the needle, and a backup take of Bryan going for the stab:
"Thank God I shot for this as a contingency plan. It was, like, my Plan B."
— Zach Cregger, via TheWrap
The reworked ending keeps hope alive until the final shot, which is exactly what makes the final shot land. Abrams has said it was "really important" to him that Bryan's humanity survive to the end — the theatrical cut is the version where it almost does.
The cure survives to the last scene of the theatrical cut. In the ending shot first, it was destroyed before the fight even started.
The result Sony got
- Opening: $60 million domestic, the biggest debut in the franchise's 24-year movie history, off a $75 million budget.
- Reviews: 96% on Rotten Tomatoes — the highest-rated video game movie ever), ahead of every previous Resident Evil by a margin that isn't close.
- Audiences: a B+ CinemaScore, which for a horror movie with this ending reads as applause.
The ending still split viewers enough that Cregger spent September explaining it in interviews. The explanation amounts to: you were supposed to feel terrible, just not that early.
Previously we wrote: Whalefall book ending explained: read this before the movie hits theaters this week