Zach Cregger’s ‘The Flood’ Is Chasing ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil just posted the biggest opening day in the franchise’s history, after a test-screening process that talked him out of some of the jokes. The movie he makes next is not a horror movie at all.
Across a run of interviews tied to the release, Cregger has been talking about The Flood, the science fiction thriller he is directing for New Line and Warner Bros. with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment producing. “I just love the story, dude,” he told Men’s Health. “That movie is about something in a real way that’s important to me.”
Then he named the film he keeps circling, and prefaced it with an apology.
Why He Brought Up ‘2001’
“I’m not comparing it to 2001, because I think 2001 is a true masterpiece in every sense of the word,” Cregger said, “but there’s a bizarreness to that movie that’s really undeniable, and it’s also a horror movie.”
That last clause is the interesting one, and he is right about it. 2001: A Space Odyssey gets shelved under science fiction because of the hardware, but the HAL stretch is a haunted house movie with better lighting, and the monolith is a cursed object that does something irreversible to a human mind and then declines to explain itself. Kubrick withholds. So does Cregger. The lineage is less of a reach than the disclaimer suggests.
He was careful with the genre label anyway. “It’s disturbing, but it’s not a horror movie, although there are horror scenes in it,” he told Men’s Health. He put it more bluntly to TheWrap, calling The Flood “my most disturbing movie. But it’s not intended to be scary. It’s a bit more of an adult movie.”
The Structure Is the Signature
The more revealing note was about shape. “It’s another bizarre narrative structure, but it’s not jumping perspectives,” Cregger said. “It unfolds in a very unique way.”
That is worth parsing, because the perspective relay has been his trademark twice now. Barbarian abandons its heroine at the halfway mark to follow a man who has no idea what is under the rental property he owns. Weapons breaks into labeled chapters and hands the same night to one character after another until the picture assembles itself. The Flood, by his account, keeps the strangeness and drops the relay. Whatever it does instead, it is another film Cregger has built so that the architecture is doing part of the work.
What Is Actually Known
Not much, and that appears to be deliberate. Warner Bros. dated The Flood for August 11, 2028 back in April, with Amblin producing. No cast has been announced and no synopsis has been released. Cregger told TheWrap that soft prep begins after he takes a vacation, with hard prep starting in early 2027. Speaking to Deadline earlier this month, he said the idea arrived while he was watching another movie in which a character boarded an abandoned spaceship, which is roughly as much plot as anyone outside the production currently has.
And Then He Stops
The other thing Cregger told TheWrap is that The Flood is where he gets off for a while. “I will never do this again. I can’t,” he said. “It’s not sustainable and I’ll burn out.” He floated watercolor painting as the alternative, and the wish to “create freely and without consensus and without result,” which sounds like a joke for about a second and then does not. He has made three features in four years and is about to make a fourth for Spielberg.
Gladys, the Weapons prequel, is still on the way after The Flood, though per TheWrap he is neither writing nor directing that one. Resident Evil is in theaters now, and our release calendar is tracking everything between here and 2028.
