{"id":891402,"date":"2026-09-11T05:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T05:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/891402\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T05:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T05:52:09","slug":"zach-cregger-says-he-cut-most-of-resident-evils-jokes-after-testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/891402\/","title":{"rendered":"Zach Cregger says he cut most of Resident Evil’s jokes after testing"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a former sketch comedy guy who\u2019s now found a second\u2014and pretty inarguably more successful\u2014life as a horror director, there\u2019s a certain amount of comedy that\u2019s endemic to the work of Zach Cregger. (Barbarian<\/a>\u00a0has basically everything to do with Justin Long, for instance, while you could argue that the extremely cathartic climax of Weapons<\/a>\u00a0is the punchline to what\u2019s essentially been an entire movie\u2019s worth of setup.) But fans expecting Cregger\u2019s upcoming video game adaptation Resident Evil<\/a>\u00a0to be especially gut-busting (in a\u00a0non-\u201czombie stomachs exploding\u201d sense) \u00a0should recalibrate those expectations: The writer-director says test audiences convinced him to cut a large portion of the movie\u2019s jokes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny,\u201d Cregger told\u00a0THR\u00a0this week<\/a>, revealing that, after putting the film through tests, he decided to see if the audiences who were laughing too much had a point. \u201cSo over the course of my testing, I stripped out as much of the jokes as possible. I then found that not only did the audience enjoy the movie more, but I also liked the movie a lot more.\u201d Noting that \u201cthere\u2019s not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss,\u201d Cregger opined that \u201cA little bit of humor goes a long way in a horror movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the interview, Cregger expressed his sympathy for fans of the\u00a0Resident Evil\u00a0game franchise who are angry the movie doesn\u2019t feature direct adaptations of any of its characters\u2014\u201dIf that is what you love about these games, then you\u2019re going to feel a certain way about it. \u2018Here comes yet another Hollywood movie, and they\u2019re once again not doing Leon and all the characters I was hoping they were going to do’\u201d\u2014and talked about his decision to adopt at least some of the visual language of the games for his film: \u201cI tend to think that the third-person perspective that the games utilize is wildly effective, and so that ended up being the movie\u2019s predominant visual language. The movie is stronger for it. But it\u2019s only inspired by the games; there wasn\u2019t any sort of rule. So I jumped from third person to first person to objective all the time, and it\u2019s a blend. It\u2019s a moment-by-moment thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Resident Evil\u00a0arrives in theaters on September 18.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a former sketch comedy guy who\u2019s now found a second\u2014and pretty inarguably more successful\u2014life as a horror…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":891403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-891402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=891402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/891402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/891403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=891402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=891402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=891402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}