“Resident Evil” Shot the Car Flip and the Skybridge Falls as Stunts First — Then Rebuilt Them in CG and Kept the Plates as Reference
- A new VFX breakdown shows how much of "Resident Evil's" action was shot practically first.
- The sheriff's car flip was a real stunt, but the performance was not what the director wanted, so it was redone as a fully CG car.
- Stunt falls were shot on the skybridge and the maternity ward and then used as reference for CG versions.
Posted: November 6, 2026
Ian Failes's breakdown of the creature and effects work on Zach Cregger's "Resident Evil" is written for the visual effects side, but it doubles as a record of how much stunt work went in the camera before it was replaced. Production visual effects supervisor Alessandro Ongaro and the Wet̄a FX team walk through several sequences where the stunt department shot the beat for real and the final frame is something else.
The sheriff's car flip is the clearest case: it was performed as a practical stunt, the flip did not read the way the director wanted, and UPP rebuilt it with a fully CG car. The falling infected on the skybridge went the same way — Ongaro says stunts were performed for the falls and then used as reference for the digital versions. The infected dropping out of the maternity-ward blood sacs mixed practical stunt work with CG.
On "jumper street," more than fifty bags of roughly 60kg were dropped from cranes across two nights to cover the sound and the impacts, with Austin Abrams running the sequence himself; a stunt performer on a wire was flown as a timing reference for one of the jumps before Wet̄a added 107 CG falling bodies around it. For the Pedestrian creature, Cregger's first idea was Cirque du Soleil gymnasts strapped together; the tests did not get there and the creature went CG, though the same gymnasts stayed in one doorway shot.
The practical creature work that did survive is puppet and suit work rather than digital: Legacy Effects built the Puker as a performer in a puppet mask, and the 2,000-pound Fat Man as a puppet operated from underneath by three of its artists.
Learn more on IMDb: Resident Evil (2026)
