Cracking the Video Game Adaptation: Shay Hatten on Co-Writing the New Resident Evil Movie with Zach Cregger
Video game adaptations have long been the graveyard of good intentions in Hollywood. For every The Last of Us that finds its emotional footing, there are dozens of projects that mistake franchise recognition for dramatic necessity. So when the news broke that Shay Hatten — the writer behind John Wick: Chapter 3, Army of the Dead, and Day Shift — would be co-writing a new Resident Evil film alongside Barbarian director Zach Cregger, the industry paid attention. Not just because of the IP, but because of who was touching it. In a recent interview with Creative Screenwriting, Hatten opened up about the collaboration, the pressure of adapting one of gaming's most iconic survival-horror franchises, and the structural challenges that make or break any video game screenplay. What he revealed is a masterclass in adaptation thinking — and it's directly applicable whether you're writing a studio tentpole or an indie horror script on a shoestring budget.
Why Video Game Adaptations Keep Failing — and What's Finally Changing
Let's be honest about the history here. The original Resident Evil film series, launched by Paul W.S. Anderson in 2002, made enormous amounts of money while earning the contempt of the gaming community. The films drifted so far from the source material that by the sixth installment, they bore almost no thematic resemblance to the games that inspired them. The 2021 Netflix reboot tried to course-correct and overcorrected into narrative chaos. The franchise needed a full structural reset.
What Hatten describes in his Creative Screenwriting conversation is a philosophy that more writers need to internalize: the goal of a video game adaptation is not to recreate the experience of playing the game, but to excavate the emotional and thematic DNA buried inside it. Games are experiential by design. They put agency in the player's hands. Cinema removes that agency entirely. The writer's job is to find what remains when you strip interactivity away — and then build a story around those bones.
This is not a new idea in theory, but it's one the industry has consistently fumbled in practice. The difference now, in 2026, is that a generation of filmmakers who actually grew up playing these games are the ones getting the greenlight. Cregger is a prime example. His work on Barbarian demonstrated an instinctive understanding of slow-burn dread, environmental horror, and subverted audience expectation — all qualities baked into the DNA of Resident Evil as a game series. Pairing him with Hatten, a writer known for propulsive genre craft and world-building economy, creates a collaboration that functions less like a studio assignment and more like a genuine creative match.
The Hatten-Cregger Collaboration: How the Script Actually Got Written
One of the most instructive elements of Hatten's interview is how transparently he discusses the mechanics of the co-writing process itself. Writing partnerships are notoriously difficult to sustain, especially when one half of the duo is also the director — a dynamic that inevitably shifts the power balance in the room. Hatten is candid about navigating that tension. Cregger, who made his bones in sketch comedy before pivoting to feature horror, brings a structural intuition that is simultaneously improvisational and precise. Hatten describes their working process as genuinely dialogic — not one writer pitching pages while the other reacts, but a sustained conversation about character motivation, tonal register, and what the film is ultimately about.
This kind of collaborative rigor is something I've watched get shortchanged on smaller productions where co-writers work in isolation and then stitch scenes together like a patchwork quilt. The seams always show. What Hatten and Cregger appear to have built is a shared vocabulary for the project — a document of intentions that precedes any actual scene writing. For indie screenwriters, this is a transferable discipline. Before you write a single line of dialogue in a collaboration, you need to be able to answer the same five questions about your story simultaneously, without conferring. If your answers diverge, the script will too.
The Question of Fidelity vs. Function
Hatten addresses directly the question every adaptation writer faces: how faithful do you stay to the source? His answer is nuanced in a way that reveals genuine craft thinking. Fidelity, he argues, is not about reproducing plot mechanics or replicating specific scenes. It is about honoring the feeling that made the original property matter to its audience. In Resident Evil's case, that feeling is a very specific cocktail: resource scarcity, institutional betrayal, body horror, and the creeping realization that the environment itself is hostile. The games have always been fundamentally about what happens to people when the systems designed to protect them become the things trying to kill them. Hatten and Cregger built their screenplay around that thematic core rather than any single game's plot.
This approach has practical implications for writers at every budget level. When I talk to indie filmmakers about adaptation — whether they're working from a short story, a graphic novel, or, increasingly, a game property in the public domain — the ones who succeed are almost always the ones who can articulate theme before plot. Not 'what happens' but 'what does it mean.' That clarity of intent is what keeps a script coherent when production realities force changes to the plan.
Photo by Clastr Cloud Gaming on Unsplash
What Independent Filmmakers Can Learn From This Process
It would be easy to read coverage of a major studio horror adaptation and conclude that none of it applies to the work most of us are actually doing. That would be a mistake. The structural and philosophical challenges Hatten describes are not scale-dependent. They are craft problems, and craft problems have transferable solutions.
Consider the resource question. Resident Evil as a franchise is built on scarcity — limited ammunition, limited health, limited information. The games train players to treat every resource as precious. Translating that into cinema requires building genuine stakes around scarcity without the audience feeling manipulated. This is exactly the same problem a low-budget horror director faces when they're lighting an indie film on a budget — you're not hiding your limitations, you're weaponizing them. The creative constraint becomes the aesthetic. Hatten's script, if the approach he describes holds through production, is essentially doing the same thing at a structural level: using narrative scarcity to generate tension.
The production dimension matters too. A project of this scale involves an enormous number of stakeholders — studio executives, producers, the IP holders at Capcom, the director, and the writers themselves. Understanding what a film producer actually does becomes critical context for any writer trying to understand how their screenplay will be shaped, protected, or compromised by the time it reaches production. Hatten's experience across multiple studio projects has clearly given him a sophisticated understanding of that ecosystem. For emerging writers, developing that literacy early is not optional — it's survival.
The Distribution Reality Behind Big IP Projects
There's also a business dimension to this story that doesn't get discussed enough in craft-focused coverage. The new Resident Evil film is being positioned at a moment when the theatrical vs. streaming debate has reached a kind of uneasy equilibrium in 2026. Major horror IP like this still commands theatrical priority, but the ancillary market — streaming rights, international distribution, VOD windows — is increasingly where studio math gets made. For writers and filmmakers trying to understand why certain creative decisions get made or reversed during development, understanding how film distribution works is essential context. A script that works as a contained, atmospheric horror film is also a script that performs well across distribution windows. That's not a coincidence — it's a calculation that experienced producers and studios make early, and smart writers learn to anticipate it.
The Broader Lesson: Genre Craft Is Structural Craft
What makes Hatten's discussion with Creative Screenwriting genuinely valuable for working filmmakers is the consistency of his underlying argument: genre is not decoration. Horror, action, science fiction — these are not tonal coatings applied to a story. They are structural systems with their own internal logic, their own promises to the audience, and their own mechanisms for generating and releasing tension. When he talks about approaching Resident Evil, he's not talking about jump scares and zombie makeup. He's talking about information architecture — what the audience knows, when they know it, and what they're afraid will happen next.
Cregger demonstrated exactly this understanding in Barbarian, a film that restructures itself mid-narrative to devastating effect. The screenplay withholds and reveals with surgical precision. Bringing that sensibility to a franchise with Resident Evil's legacy demands — decades of lore, passionate fans, prior film iterations both beloved and reviled — is an enormous structural challenge. Hatten's framing of the task is instructive: you are not writing for the fans, you are writing a film that fans and newcomers alike can enter, and that means the screenplay has to work as a standalone experience first.
That principle, more than any specific craft technique, is what every writer should take from this conversation. The source material is research. The screenplay is the work. And the work, at its best, makes the audience forget they ever needed the source material at all. If Hatten and Cregger have pulled that off with one of gaming's most scrutinized franchises, it will be because they committed to that discipline from the first conversation — and refused to let the weight of the IP crush the story underneath it.