Resident Evil just became the best reviewed video game movie ever
Zach Cregger's reboot opened to $60 million and a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, both franchise records.
Director Zach Cregger at San Diego Comic-Con 2026. Photo by Kevin Paul, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A Resident Evil movie just got a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. That sentence would have been a joke a year ago.
Zach Cregger's reboot opened Friday and pulled $60 million domestically, which is the biggest opening the franchise has ever had. Worldwide it hit $108 million in three days. The old record was Resident Evil: Afterlife back in 2010, and that only did $26 million. So this thing more than doubled it.
The reviews are the real story
The money is nice but the scores are what nobody saw coming. 96% on Rotten Tomatoes makes it the best reviewed video game movie ever made, period. For comparison, the original 2002 Resident Evil with Milla Jovovich sat at 36%, and the best any of those six movies managed was 38%.
That is a 58 point jump for a series people mostly watched ironically.
Cregger is the guy who made Barbarian and then Weapons, so horror people already knew he could do this. Weapons opened at $43 million last year and ended up at $270 million worldwide on a $38 million budget. Studios noticed.
One thing worth watching
Critics loved it. Audiences liked it. There is a difference.
The CinemaScore came back a B+, which is solid but not amazing. Horror films tend to score lower there because audiences grade a movie on whether it was fun, not whether it was well made. Still, a B+ with a 96% critic score means the two groups are not exactly lined up.
Second place went to Practical Magic 2 with $12.16 million, down 59% from its opening. That is a rough drop.
The cast is Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser. Sony put it out with PlayStation Productions attached, and reports put the budget somewhere around $75 to $80 million.
What to watch for: whether it holds up next weekend. Horror openings are front loaded, and a big first weekend followed by a face plant is the normal pattern for the genre. If this one only drops 40% or so, Sony has a new franchise on its hands.