'Resident Evil' Ending Explained: How Zach Cregger Quietly Sets Up a Sequel

Resident Evil saves its most frightening mutation for last

After spending most of its runtime moving at a frankly ridiculous pace, Resident Evil tapers into what is inarguably one of the best video game movie endings ever and arrives at the exact place you might expect a Resident Evil story to end. There are plenty of skin-dripping zombies, grotesque mutations, and blood (quite literally) everywhere.

Zach Cregger offers a solid entry into the Resident Evil universe, but also opens the door to some surprising mysteries waiting to be unpacked in either a new game or another movie. While the film exists in parallel to the games, the ending, in particular, connects most directly to the rest of the franchise. How exactly does it all connect? To explain, we'll have to dive into the film's (literally) explosive ending.

Warning: Full spoilers for Resident Evil follow.

Resident Evil's ending explained

Cregger’s Resident Evil kicks off with Bryan Hodukavich (Austin Abrams), a medical delivery driver and soon-to-be-father, getting roped into a particularly perilous consignment that takes him straight to the heart of Raccoon City. For those unaware of the game lore, the Midwestern municipality serves as Ground Zero for the entire Resident Evil franchise.

Ostensibly a quiet mountain town, Raccoon City is actually a corporate stronghold bankrolled by the shadowy Umbrella Corporation, maker of the infamous T-Virus. After this biological weapon leaks from one of the corporation’s many secret underground facilities, the town transforms overnight into a quarantined nightmare.

This initial outbreak in Raccoon City has served as the big inciting incident for decades' worth of games, making it the perfect setting for Cregger’s high-stakes finale. Despite several close calls, Bryan survives long enough to make it into the devastated city with the potential cure in tow. However, he's also suffered a nasty zombie bite, one that creates a ticking clock for his demise.

In typical Resident Evil fashion, mirroring nearly every game from Resident Evil 1 to Resident Evil 9, the film culminates in a secret lab tucked away at the top of the hospital, where reclusive researchers have been working diligently on an antidote. Bryan, the world’s most unlikely savior, arrives with the exact puzzle piece needed to finish the cure.

It seems our hero might actually make it out of this alive. It’s an ending filled with an equal measure of tension and hope while Bryan watches in desperation as the scientists work to deliver the antidote — but it’s too late. He inevitably succumbs to his wound and transforms into a horrifying monstrosity, devouring and then fusing with the dead scientists in the room like a Playd-Oh figure gone wrong. Missing him by only a few inches, the cure falls aimlessly into the void of rubble below the hospital, likely destroyed from the sheer height of the drop.

It's the kind of grotesque final mutation that feels designed for a Resident Evil boss fight, and sure enough, helicopters descend on Raccoon City as the National Guard finally arrives. The movie ends on that image of an outbreak that has clearly escaped the confines of the hospital. It's a suitably nasty cliffhanger (even if Bryan's doom seems pretty sealed), but there's another detail here that makes the ending particularly interesting.

How the ending of Resident Evil sets up a sequel

For all the movie's breakneck pacing and increasingly ridiculous body horror, the cure gives the ending a surprisingly important wrinkle. The researchers weren't merely close to finding a way to stop this particular infection; they actually managed to create a viable option. The question remains: Did the syringe survive the fall at the end of the movie? Could the cure be replicated in some capacity? It’s tough to say, but it’s a significant development for Resident Evil.

The Resident Evil franchise has always been fascinated by the idea of viruses and bioweapons spiraling beyond the control of the people who created them. Usually, the solution is some combination of destroying the laboratory, killing the monster, and getting out before everything explodes. Here, Cregger introduces something slightly more hopeful in showcasing how the nightmare might actually be reversible, only for everything to go horribly wrong.

While survival horror is typically synonymous with scrambling for ammo and dodging bioweapons, the desperate hunt for a cure is actually deeply embedded in Resident Evil history. Key entries in the games frequently center around synthesizing or securing an antidote before a city — or the entire planet — goes up in flames. From the life-saving T-Vaccine that Dr. Nathaniel Bard crafts to treat Jill Valentine in Resident Evil 3 to the famous "Daylight" reagent developed in Resident Evil Outbreak, the concept of a fragile cure acting as a high-stakes plot catalyst is a classic Capcom hallmark that Cregger seamlessly adapts, if only in its closing moments.

Cregger doesn't seem particularly interested in making a sequel, though he also told Polygon he's already thinking about where the story could go next. But if the movie does well at the box office, it's almost a given that Hollywood will demand a follow-up film of some sort. In that case, the hunt for Bryan's lost cure could be a major focus of Resident Evil 2.

Resident Evil is in theaters now.