Resident Evil's Story Is The Bad Ending To A Movie That Released One Week Before It
Padraig is a Senior Features Writer and has been part of Screen Rant since 2017. Padraig is a writer, editor and retired Game of Thrones extra who has been writing about movies and TV online for over a decade. He has also written for The Irish Times, Den Of Geek, Little White Lies and many more. It's pronounced Paw-rick, BTW.
Warning: Spoilers for Resident Evil (2026) belowResident Evil shares a premise with an explosive action movie that arrived only one week before it, but the two differ wildly in execution. While the Resident Evil movie franchise starring Milla Jovovich was wildly successful, it's a fair statement that these OTT actioners left fans of the games wanting.
The Resident Evil games are, for the most part, focused on horror and suspense, but the Jovovich saga was very much about delivering wild setpieces and action. Despite Zach Cregger's Resident Evil becoming a huge box office success and earning raves, it still proved controversial with the fanbase. A vocal section wanted the reboot to be a faithful adaptation of one of the classic games, whereas Cregger offers an original story set in the world of the games.
Regardless, the movie has been an undeniable hit, and will almost certainly receive a sequel. Weirdly, Resident Evil also shares the same basic setup as Alan Ritchson's Runner, which arrived one week before it. Both involve an everyman medical courier tasked with delivering an important package within a tight deadline, and running through a hellish gauntlet to get the job done.
Sure, Runner is more of a straight-ahead action thriller, but aside from sharing the courier premise, they have a surprising amount in common. Both feature their protagonists at key turning points in their lives, where Resident Evil's Bryan (Austin Abrams) finds out he's about to become a father, while Alan Ritchson's Hank is learning to move on from a loved one's death.
Zach Cregger's next movie will be the sci-fi epic The Flood.
Both movies take place in the span of just a few hours, with their respective heroes racing through a city to reach a hospital, which is where their final battles take place. Of course, the similarities are broad, since Runner is a throwback to 1980s action movies, while Resident Evil is very much leaning into the survival horror tone of its video game source material.
Even then, the latter still has plenty of laughs, as Bryan is a lovable loser of a protagonist who succeeds more through luck and determination than skill. Resident Evil and Runner both see the main characters reaching their end goals - though only one of them truly has a happy ending.
Runner And Resident Evil Ultimately Have Very Different Tones
Runner has had - fittingly enough - a run of bad luck, given that it also arrived one week after Prime Video's poorly reviewed The Runner, starring Gal Gadot. The fact that a film arrived the week after Ritchson's Runner with virtually the same hook is an exquisite piece of bad timing, especially as Resident Evil has outperformed it in just about every way possible. Still, Ritchson's actioner will certainly find a willing audience on VOD and streaming, and it's doing something very different to Zach Cregger's horror outing.
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Runner is set in Australia, and is for the most part a colorful, pulpy action flick. Ritchson and Wilson make for a fun buddy duo, and it has some effectively crunchy action. The difference between it and Resident Evil is day and night - in that Runner is set entirely during the daytime while Cregger's offering is all at night. For all its humor, the movie has plenty of suspense and body horror, including a couple of moments where Bryan has to make some morally questionable choices.
It could be argued Cregger's latest opus has a touch too much humor, which can undercut moments it shouldn't. Even so, Resident Evil is a blast from beginning to end, and Bryan's night from hell rarely pauses once it kicks off. It's the better film than Runner, a film that makes for a nice way to kill time on a rainy Tuesday night, but it will evaporate from memory once Wednesday morning dawns.
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