Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is set to release in just under a week, and the director has been on a self-described “apology tour” to promote the unfairly maligned film. However, Cregger doesn’t seem to be particularly sour about the feedback he’s been receiving.
Case in point: in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter (via PC Gamer), Cregger stated that he agreed with the criticism from Resident Evil’s test audiences that the movie was “too funny,” and found that he “also liked the movie a lot more” after following their advice.
“I learned that people really liked the movie, but they thought it was too funny,” Cregger revealed. “So 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,” he continued. “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.”
On one hand, it does seem a tad silly that Zach Cregger, who is well-known for producing horror films that deftly weave in humor amid the pulse-pounding scares, had to tone down the humor in a Resident Evil film. I mean, the games are notoriously goofy (I could literally insert any quip from Leon Kennedy here as proof), and Cregger seems like a perfect fit to deliver his own take on the series in that regard.
That said, the important thing is that Cregger believes the film is better because of the changes. The man is on a horror hot streak at the moment, so I very much trust his judgement here.
Still, it’ll be interesting to line up the final product with the leaked script for Resident Evil that dropped back in March, just so we can find out which jokes didn’t make the final cut.