Great endings become great through careful calibration. The right timing, the right music, the right editing. All of it has to be perfectly in sync and considered for things to work as intended. And, with Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, the director revealed that changing one small but crucial detail took an ending that worked to an ending that really, really worked.
Spoilers follow.
At the end of Resident Evil, the main character, Bryan (Austin Abrams), gets the substance crucial to saving the world to the lab where it can be used. Unfortunately for Bryan, he was also bitten by an infected person a few hours earlier, and he becomes as concerned about getting the cure himself as he is for everyone else. It then becomes a ticking clock of whether the scientists make the cure and give it to Bryan, or will he become a monster first?
In the film, the needle holding the cure gets bumped around a bit, elevating the suspense and making you think that, maybe, there can be a happy ending and Bryan will be saved. Of course, eventually, the cure gets lost, Bryan becomes a big killer monster, and that’s that. Roll credits. But in a new interview, Cregger revealed the original ending would’ve had the cure be destroyed much earlier, flipping the tone a bit.
“Originally in the script, that scientist pulls the needle out, and as soon as Austin grabs the woman’s face, he drops it, and it shatters, and then the rest of the movie is just Austin killing the scientist,” Cregger told Collider (via Dread Central). “But I shot that shot of the scientist putting the needle in his pocket just because I had a feeling. I was like, ‘I feel like I’m gonna need that,’ and so then we were able to build a new sequence at the end.”
With the cure still in play, the movie plays the audience in a way that makes it feel completely different. “Thank god [we shot that extra bit], because that’s what we ended up using,” Cregger continues. “It keeps the stakes all the way until the end. It’s like, ‘Save him, save him,’ whereas before it was just like, ‘Kill them, I guess? Kill them all?’”
No matter what happened to the cure, though, Bryan was always, always going to change into a monster. That was non-negotiable. “If you don’t like the ending, we just disagree, and I respect it, but I would never in a million years change it,” Cregger said.
Resident Evil is now in theaters.
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