Cregger's 'Resident Evil' Eyes Franchise-Record $50M Debut

Deadline and TheWrap report Zach Cregger's 'Resident Evil' is headed for the franchise's best-ever opening weekend after record $8.8M previews.

Zach Cregger's 'Resident Evil' is bound for the best opening the franchise has seen in its 24 years of features, with Deadline reporting the Sony/Constantin film is tracking at least $50M domestically and possibly more, after $8.8M in Thursday previews. TheWrap, citing the same preview number, projects an opening north of $60 million. Either outcome would easily clear the series' previous domestic high of $26.6M set by 2010's 'Resident Evil: Afterlife', and would mark the best domestic start ever for Cregger as a filmmaker, surpassing his 2025 hit 'Weapons' at $43.5M.

Heading into the week, tracking expected a $40M-plus opening similar to Cregger's 'Weapons', but TheWrap reports that advance sales accelerated quickly after critics hailed the film as the best 'Resident Evil' adaptation yet with a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score on Wednesday. Deadline notes Thursday's $8.8M preview take alone demolished the franchise's previous preview high — just $1M for 2016's 'Resident Evil: The Final Chapter' — and even outpaced strong horror launches like Scream 7 ($7.8M), Cregger's own 'Weapons' ($5.75M) and Mortal Kombat 2 ($5.2M). The film played in 3,166 theaters across PLF and Imax formats.

Rotten Tomatoes' roundup of first reviews says critics are calling Cregger's take not just the best 'Resident Evil' film ever, but one of the best video game adaptations of all time. IndieWire's David Ehrlich wrote it 'viscerally' evokes what it feels like to play the games, while Decoding Everything's Matt Goldberg called it a lesson to filmmakers that adapting a game cannot simply be a series of references. Reviewers praised Austin Abrams as a star-making lead, Dariusz Wolski's game-like cinematography, and Legacy Effects' 2,000-pound monster puppets, with some quibbles over whether the humor undercuts the scares.

The audience data backing the opening is unusually strong for the series. Deadline reports PostTrak from Screen Engine showed 4.5 out of 5 stars, a 70% definite recommend overall and 75% among men over 25, the biggest quadrant at 45%, with 52% of Friday ticket buyers walking up the same day. Rotten Tomatoes showed a 91% audience score — far above the 67% franchise-best held by the 2002 original — and TheWrap cites the same 90%-plus audience score and 4.5/5 PostTrak result from Thursday previews. The open question Deadline flags is the CinemaScore, since no 'Resident Evil' movie has ever earned better than a B.

The opening weekend alone, per Deadline, may outgross the entire domestic runs of several prior 'Resident Evil' films, including 2002's original ($40.1M), 2012's 'Retribution' ($42.3M), 2016's 'Final Chapter' ($28.1M) and 2021's 'Welcome to Raccoon City' ($17M). JustWatch, which ranks the 2026 film first among the franchise's eight live-action entries, notes producers have spent decades trying to crack Capcom's survival-horror property since the first PlayStation games in 1996 and 1998. A $75M-net production delivering record results also extends Sony's hot quarter after 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day'.

TheWrap says the strong preview result positions 'Resident Evil' to give the box office fresh momentum heading into next weekend, when 'Avengers: Endgame Encore', Universal/DreamWorks' 'Forgotten Island' and A24's 'Primetime' arrive. It also projects that 2026's domestic total will cross $7.5 billion this weekend en route to a $10.5 billion-plus year. Deadline adds that RelishMix observed fans on social media treating the film like a survival-horror fantasy draft, trusting Cregger's horror pedigree, while distributors caution that how front-loaded the horror film proves beyond opening weekend remains the key wait-and-see factor.