Seven Resident Evil Movies Opened to About $131 Million Combined. Zach Cregger's Reboot Just Made $60 Million on Its Own

Start with one number: $131 million. That's roughly what all seven earlier live-action Resident Evil movies made on their opening weekends, added together, across nineteen years and one very long run of Milla Jovovich zombie sequels. Zach Cregger's reboot just made an estimated $60 million in a single weekend from 3,684 theaters. That's nearly half of that entire pile, in three days.

Nobody saw it coming quite this big. Tracking had the film somewhere between $40 million and $50 million. Sony's own projection on Saturday was $53 to $55 million. Then Sunday's studio estimates landed at $60 million, and with $48.3 million more from overseas the worldwide opening hit $108.3 million. Five years ago the last attempt to reboot this series, Welcome to Raccoon City, opened to $5.3 million and vanished. If you'd told a studio executive that back in 2021, they'd have asked what you were drinking.

How the weekend played out

The build-up started Thursday night, when previews brought in $8.8 million. That's a franchise record by a mile; Screen Rant reports the old best, for The Final Chapter, was around $1 million. Friday's opening day added up to $26.3 million, which on its own is almost the same as Afterlife's entire three-day opening from 2010. Sony saw that and projected $53 to $55 million for the weekend, while other industry sources were already whispering $60 million. The whisperers were right. Saturday and Sunday held up well enough to push the total past even Sony's number, which is exactly what you want from a horror release, since scary movies tend to burn their audience off early.

The rest of the chart looks healthy too. TheWrap's Saturday projection had the whole weekend near $111 million, up 27% from last weekend and 45% from the same September weekend a year ago, with Resident Evil accounting for more than half of it. Behind it, Practical Magic 2 took second with roughly $12 million in its second weekend, a drop of about 59%, for around $50 million domestic (we covered its opening and the critics-versus-audience split last week). Spider-Man: Brand New Day added about $6.5 million and now sits near $944 million domestic, a total that made it the highest-grossing release in U.S. box office history. The Odyssey pulled in about $4.9 million and has passed $609 million domestic and $1.72 billion worldwide.

One housekeeping note, because it matters: every weekend figure in this story is a studio estimate released Sunday. Actuals arrive Monday and usually shift by a small amount either way.

Every Resident Evil opening, side by side

The history of this franchise reads differently when every entry sits in one column, so we built the table below from the trade reports linked at the bottom of this story. The right-hand columns are the part I'd look at twice.

Three things jump out. First, the old series averaged about $18.7 million on opening weekend, so the new film is more than three times a typical entry. Second, its opening alone is bigger than the entire U.S. run of every earlier movie except Afterlife, and that one ($60.1 million) should fall to a single weekday of business. Third, look at the release months: four of the seven earlier films opened in September, which makes this franchise a September franchise as much as anything. Cregger's movie fits right into that pattern, just at more than double the scale.

Even after adjusting for inflation, the comparison holds. Apocalypse, the best of the older openings in today's money at roughly $44 million, still trails the new film by about a third. There's one fair caution here, which IndieWire raised: the 2002 original finished with just under $103 million worldwide, so this weekend's $108.3 million global debut beats the original's whole run in raw dollars. Adjusted for inflation, though, the original still comes out ahead, so that's a fun fact rather than a fair fight.

Who actually bought the tickets

Deadline's PostTrak breakdown is the most interesting piece of data in the whole weekend, because it shows who Sony actually reached. The crowd was 66% male and 34% female. Men over 25 were the largest group at 44%, followed by men under 25 at 22%, women over 25 at 20% and women under 25 at 13%. For comparison, the audience for The Final Chapter split 60/40 by gender. In other words, a reboot pitched as a fresh start is skewing a bit more male than The Final Chapter did, not less.

Why they came is just as telling. Deadline's numbers had franchise loyalists at 46% of the audience and Cregger's own fans at 37%. The two groups obviously overlap, so don't add them up, but it means the reboot pulled both the people who've been buying tickets to this series since 2002 and the people who've followed Cregger himself since Barbarian and Weapons. About 35% of the crowd was under 25 (that's the 22% plus the 13% above), which fits an analyst's point in Variety that Gen Z has become a major box office driver and loves horror. And on opening night, 28% of the audience came with a spouse or partner, a hopeful sign that the movie can travel beyond the core fan base. Opening-night data also showed a broad mix of moviegoers: 41% white, 28% Latino or Hispanic, 13% Black, 11% Asian American and 7% Native American or other.

The overseas flip nobody's talking about

Here's a piece of math I haven't seen anyone else publish. Add up the final U.S. totals in the table and you get roughly $287 million. The seven earlier films made around $1.28 billion worldwide, according to Wikipedia's franchise tally. That means the old Resident Evil movies earned only about a fifth to a quarter of their money at the domestic box office and the rest overseas. These were movies that lived on foreign audiences.

The new film flips that. Of its $108.3 million global opening, $60 million (about 55%) came from the U.S. and Canada, with $48.3 million overseas. That overseas number is still big; The Playlist reports it's the largest overseas opening for any horror movie this year, and the U.K. ($5.8 million) and Mexico ($5.6 million) led the way. A Yahoo Entertainment report says that in like-for-like markets the film is opening 66% ahead of Weapons, which finished with $118.5 million overseas. And Japan, where the games come from, doesn't get the movie until October 9.

Why does that matter? Because a movie that opens 55% at home is one American audiences are excited about, not just one that travels well. For anyone at Sony weighing what comes next, that's a very different starting point than the one this series has ever had.

Can it hold? Three scenarios, with the math

An opening is only half the story, and honestly the easier half to celebrate. The number that matters is the multiple: how many times its opening weekend a movie ends up grossing. We put together three scenarios below. They're not forecasts, just arithmetic to show why the range of outcomes is so wide.

Which one do I believe? The good reception (B+ CinemaScore, 91% from audiences, 95% from critics as of Sunday) pushes me toward the middle of that table rather than the bottom. The risk is that 46% of the opening crowd was franchise loyalists who were always going to show up in the first three days. Five Nights at Freddy's was also streaming on Peacock from day one, so it's an imperfect comparison, but the underlying risk is the same: Resident Evil has to prove that people who weren't already fans will buy tickets next weekend. Monday and Tuesday numbers will tell us a lot. So will the second Friday.

What comes next

The runway looks decent. TheWrap names Universal and Blumhouse's Other Mommy and Warner Bros.' Clayface as the competition to watch next month, and according to the release calendars those land October 9 and October 23. Japan gets Resident Evil on October 9 as well. That gives the film at least its second and third weekends in the U.S. before the next big horror titles show up.

And what about a sequel? The Hollywood Reporter framed the status of one as the big question after this weekend, alongside Cregger's other projects, which include The Flood and a prequel to Weapons. As of Sunday afternoon we hadn't seen Sony announce anything. With a $60 million opening and this kind of audience response, I'd be surprised if it stays quiet for long, though that's a guess, not a report.