← Back to BracksterNews Dimly lit, decaying hospital corridor with peeling walls and archways, illustrative photo

Movies - Resident Evil

Every Resident Evil Movie Before This One Scored Under 40% on Rotten Tomatoes. Zach Cregger Just Hit 96% Without a Single Familiar Face

Six live-action Resident Evil movies came and went between 2002 and 2021 without ever cracking 40% on Rotten Tomatoes. Cregger's reboot, which skips every recognizable character from the games in favor of a panicking medical courier, is sitting at 96% from more than 70 critics the night before it opens wide — and somehow that's not even the most interesting number attached to it this week.

By Gustavo Henrique · About the author

AUSTIN, TEXAS · SEP 17, 2026 ~7 MIN READ

I've watched enough Resident Evil movies get dragged by critics over the years that I genuinely had to refresh Rotten Tomatoes twice before I believed the number. Zach Cregger's reboot premiered Tuesday night at Fantastic Fest here in Austin, and by Wednesday morning the aggregate had already spiked to 98% on an early batch of reviews before settling, as more critics weighed in, at a still-absurd 96% from over 70 of them. For context: not one of the six live-action films the franchise put out between 2002 and 2021 ever got above 40% on the same site. This isn't a modest improvement. It's a different sport.

In Brief

Resident Evil has settled at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes from more than 70 critics after briefly touching 98% on its first day of reviews — the highest score of any video game movie ever recorded, ahead of Cregger's own Barbarian (92%) and Weapons (93%), and far past every prior live-action Resident Evil film, none of which cracked 40%.
The story is entirely original: Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier who gets trapped overnight in a viral outbreak at a Raccoon City hospital. Cregger has said he skipped the previous films entirely and built the movie to feel like playing the games rather than adapt any specific one, which means no Jill Valentine, no Chris Redfield, no familiar face from the franchise at all.
The film opens wide Friday, September 18, on a reported $75 million budget, with tracking that started around a $35 million domestic weekend in early September and has since climbed toward $45 to $60 million — which would blow past Resident Evil: Afterlife's $26.6 million franchise-best opening from 2010.

A director who admits he never watched the other six

Cregger has been upfront about something that would sound like a red flag coming from almost anyone else: he'd never seen a single one of the previous Resident Evil movies before making his own, and he approached the games themselves as the only source material worth honoring. Rather than dramatize a specific game's plot or bring back Milla Jovovich's Alice or any of the series' other recurring faces, he wrote an entirely new story with Shay Hatten and handed the lead to Austin Abrams, fresh off a supporting turn in Cregger's "Weapons" last year. Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier making a routine drop-off at Raccoon City General Hospital when a viral outbreak turns his shift into an overnight fight for his life against a hospital full of mutated creatures. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser round out the cast, and Sony booked the film into roughly 3,000 theaters for a wide release Friday, one day after its Fantastic Fest premiere.

The decision to leave out every recognizable character wasn't received quietly. Long before critics saw a frame of it, a loud stretch of the fanbase treated the absence of Jill, Chris, Leon or Umbrella as an insult to the games, and that skepticism followed the marketing campaign for months. Cregger's counter to all of it has been consistent: he's said the goal was never a checklist of Easter eggs, it was recreating the specific dread of playing a Resident Evil game late at night with the sound up too loud — the slow-opening doors, the ammo you're too scared to use, the sense that whatever's coming is worse than what you're imagining. Reading through this week's reviews, that's exactly the argument critics keep making in his favor, whether or not they'd have bet on it going in.

The 96% — and the three reviews that disagree with it

What's actually driving that score is worth sitting with, because it's not just genre horror fans being generous. The Guardian gave it four out of five and singled out a pace that never lets up. IndieWire landed on a B+, praising how thoroughly Cregger fused a video game's rhythm with a movie's structure. The Hollywood Reporter called the finished film both terrifying and funny in a way that still feels propulsive rather than scattered, and GameSpot — a site with every incentive to be skeptical of a franchise this checkered — scored it 8 out of 10 for capturing something close to the actual feeling of playing the games rather than just watching someone else play them. Metacritic's aggregate landed at 80, again the highest of any video game adaptation the site has tracked, genre or otherwise.

It isn't a unanimous rave, and the dissents are specific rather than dismissive, which is part of why I trust the 96% more than I would a cleaner sweep. Blu-ray.com's Brian Orndorf gave it a C, describing a film that can't settle between playing its scares straight and undercutting them with jokes. Cinefilia's Yasser Medina scored it 5 out of 10, arguing Cregger nails the survival-horror atmosphere but leans on a fairly predictable structure underneath it. A third reviewer, writing for Macabre Daily, made almost the identical point: the film captures what it feels like to be inside the games, then loses that tension once the whiplash between horror and comedy sets in for good. All three complaints point at the same seam in the movie — the tonal gear-shifting that's basically become a Cregger signature since "Barbarian" — and none of them are arguing the film is incompetent, just that the mix doesn't always land clean.

What Sony is actually betting on this weekend

None of that critical goodwill guarantees a big opening weekend on its own, and Sony knows it. Tracking for Resident Evil started conservatively at around $35 million domestic in early September, with some estimates as low as $35 to $50 million even after Cregger's name got attached. Strong early ticket sales this week pushed several outlets to raise that range toward $45 to $60 million domestic, with a worldwide debut projected as high as $80 million against a reported $75 million production budget. Even the low end of that range would be a franchise record: the biggest domestic opening any Resident Evil movie has ever posted is $26.6 million, set by "Resident Evil: Afterlife" back in 2010 during the post-"Avatar" wave of 3D horror releases. Seven prior films made $1.27 billion worldwide over nearly two decades without a single one of them being taken seriously by critics, which is exactly the ceiling Cregger's version is now positioned to break through from both directions at once — reviews and box office, together, for what might be the first time in this franchise's history.

Commentary: Gustavo Henrique

The thing I keep circling back to isn't the 96%, it's the decision that made the 96% possible in the first place. Cregger could have played it safe. He had a built-in fanbase, twenty years of recognizable names, and a genuinely simple path to a movie nobody would love but nobody would actively resent either — a competent, faithful, forgettable seventh entry. Instead he threw out the character sheet entirely and bet that critics and audiences alike care more about how a horror movie feels than which action figures show up in it. That's a legitimately bigger risk than anything in "Barbarian" or "Weapons," because those were original ideas with no built-in expectations to violate. This one had twenty years of built-in expectations, and he violated basically all of them on purpose. The fact that it worked with critics doesn't retroactively make it a safe move. It makes it a well-executed one, which is a different thing, and I think that distinction is going to matter a lot once actual audiences start weighing in this weekend instead of critics who go in professionally open-minded.

Here's my honest hesitation, and it's the same one those three dissenting reviews are circling: horror-comedy whiplash is Cregger's whole thing at this point, and it's worked twice in a row for him with original material where audiences had zero fixed expectations walking in. Resident Evil fans, by contrast, have spent decades split between wanting real dread and wanting the specific campy absurdity the games themselves have always flirted with. If Cregger's tonal gear-shifting lands the way it did with "Weapons," this could be the movie that finally convinces Hollywood a video game adaptation doesn't have to choose between honoring the source and being a genuinely good film on its own terms — something Mortal Kombat II and Detective Pikachu have gestured toward but never quite closed the loop on. If it doesn't land with a mainstream Friday-night crowd the way it landed with critics who'd read every glowing pre-release piece, we'll be having a very different conversation about this one by Monday morning. Either way, I'd rather watch a studio take this particular swing than get a competent, focus-tested eighth entry that plays it exactly as safe as the first seven did.

HOW WE REPORTED THIS

Independently reported and written for this story — see our full editorial methodology for how we verify claims and separate fact from analysis.