Resident Evil Film Breaks Franchise Box Office Record With $108.3 Million Opening Weekend

The live-action Resident Evil film, directed by Zach Cregger, has become the highest-grossing movie in the franchise's cinematic history after earning $108.3 million worldwide during its opening weekend.

The film brought in $60 million from the domestic US box office and $48.3 million from international markets. This performance exceeded initial projections, which expected the movie to earn between $40 million and $50 million domestically.

The strong box office performance aligns with the film's critical reception. At the time of the report, Resident Evil held a 95 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 91 percent audience rating. Reviews praised the film for capturing what makes the game franchise popular, particularly its balance of comedy and horror.

Cregger took a distinct approach to the adaptation, choosing not to directly adapt any of the Resident Evil games. Instead, he created an original story intended to capture the atmosphere and survival horror tone of the franchise. "I am not trying to adapt a video game. I'm not using the characters from the games. I'm not telling a story that the games tell because I'm not going to be able to do it better than the games," Cregger explained.

The director made deliberate creative choices to enhance the film's visual and narrative impact. He set the story in modern times rather than 1998, and added elements like snow to benefit the story and visuals, departing from the source material when he felt it served the film better.

Cregger drew structural inspiration from two existing films while creating the Resident Evil movie. "It's like if Evil Dead 2 and 1917 were its parents," he said, describing how the films influenced his approach. The connection to 1917 relates to the film's pacing, which unfolds with a sense of continuous progression similar to gameplay in the Resident Evil games themselves.

The filmmaker incorporated game mechanics and elements from the franchise into the film's narrative structure. "The games always kind of have this progression where you start with a pistol, and then you graduate to a shotgun, and then you graduate to a machine gun. There's a lot of items from the games. [The protagonist] is constantly coming up against these padlocks that are stopping him from progressing," Cregger noted when discussing how he captured the feeling of playing a Resident Evil game.