Resident Evil took the box office by storm this weekend, raking in over $100 million worldwide at the box office and setting a new benchmark for video game adaptations on the big screen. But great art takes time, and Cregger was working on the movie right up to the wire, which led to some differences between the domestic and international versions of the movie.
Speaking on The Big Picture podcast, Cregger touched on the challenge of shooting Weapons and Resident Evil back-to-back, noting that the acclaimed video game adaptation was finished “maybe” two weeks before release. That’s not outside the norm for big movies with a very tight turnaround; let’s not forget that Cregger has now released two movies in just over 12 months. What’s a little surprising is that the movie missed the international DCP deadline, meaning territories outside America received an incomplete version of the movie.
“It was pencils down at 11:59, Saturday night because the DCP had to ship,” Cregger said. “There’s actually… the international version is different than the domestic version because I was still needing to make changes and like we missed our international finish line time, you know? So there are shots I’m not stoked on in the international version that like are better in the domestic. That’s how down to the wire it was.”
Now, we don’t know exactly how the international version of the movie differs from the print being screened domestically, but the differences are most likely imperceptible to anyone but Cregger. Visual effects and color grading are two of the more common late-stage post-production processes, and given how VFX heavy Resident Evil gets for its final lab sequence in particular, it’s possible a few of these shots are more to Cregger’s liking in the domestic DCP.
Imperceptibly incomplete or not, Resident Evil has proved a big hit with audiences and critics (our glowing Resident Evil review is proof of that), even if the discourse around Cregger’s approach to adapting the games, and the mic drop Resident Evil movie ending, has reached a fever pitch in recent days. On that ending, Cregger also recently revealed how his original vision for the final sequence changed during production.
“One of the missteps I made early on was not [showing Bryan’s desperation for a cure],” Cregger said. “We reorganized the chain of events. Thank god I shot for this as a contingency plan; it was my plan B.”
Resident Evil is in theaters now. For more, see where Resident Evil ranks on our lists of the best Resident Evil movies and the best video game movies (spoiler: it ranks high).