Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is officiallya box-office hit, with a projected weekend box office over $50 million. That’s the director’s best opening so far. The trajectory of his career after Barbarianhas been something Cregger couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. He’s come a long way from the first film he co-directed, Miss March. The movie bombed at the box office and carries a 5% Rotten Tomatoes score. That negative reception caused the young filmmaker to have a crisis of faith in himself, as he thought his directing career was over. The Whitest Kids U’ Know cast member decided to focus on acting and built a modest body of work. While filming the TBS series Wrecked in Fiji, Cregger got an idea for a script he genuinely loved and threw himself into it, writing in his bungalow at night. The movie was tied to a massive IP, but like with Resident Evil, Cregger was more interested in an original character living inside the world instead of the already associated leads.
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The spec script was titled Henchman. Cregger’s screenplay would pit Batman and the Joker against each other. However, instead of focusing on the hero and villain, it would follow someone just trying to get by in Gotham City. The main character is a pharmacist who gets pulled into the classic adversaries’ latest entanglement. Cregger described the story recently to Men’s Health: “It’s a script called Henchman. It’s about a normal guy. It’s about a pharmacist who lives in Gotham City, and he gets accidentally sucked into this incredible power play between Batman and The Joker. And he finds himself a very integral part of something. And so, it’s a weird movie. It’s someone living on the periphery of all the stories in Gotham that we know of, and it’s about some rando. I’m not the world’s biggest Batman guy at all, but I just liked this story. I liked this character. I liked what happened to him, so it was just fun.”
Superheroics From a Civilian Perspective
The core idea behind Henchmanis not unprecedented. In 2017, NBC’s short-lived Powerlessalso asked what life was like for the average citizen of the DC Universe. Vanessa Hudgens starred as the head of R&D at Wayne Security, whose inventions somehow kept ending up in the hands of Batman. The workplace comedy lasted only nine episodes before cancellation. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be from Marvel Comics. 1994’s Marvels was a four-issue miniseries by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross that followed the rise of superheroes through the lens of newspaper photographer Phil Sheldon. Instead of centering on the classic Marvel characters, the comic showed what events like the arrival of Galactus and the death of Gwen Stacy meant to the everyday New Yorkers living through the age of superheroes. Like Marvels, Cregger’s script would put an ordinary person in the middle of forces beyond his control. Something Cregger is proving himself quite good at.
More important than the Batman movie we never got, Henchman got Cregger to dust himself off and get back on the filmmaking horse. To him, the screenplay was great. The only problem was that it was tied to a massively popular IP that he had no control over. So he gave himself a challenge: could he write another script he liked just as much, not based on someone else’s franchise? Cregger now had the confidence to write his shock-twist-a-minute horror breakout, Barbarian. Now that Resident Evil is in the world, Henchmanlooks like an early version of the same instinct: enter a famous universe from the sidelines instead of retelling the story of its biggest characters. Before he sent a medical courier into the apocalypse, Cregger wanted to see what happened when a pharmacist got between Batman and Joker. Now, could someone please get Zach Cregger and James Gunn on a conference call?
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil Captures the Game Experience Perfectly [REVIEW]
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