Resident Evil is heading for $40-50M, and the film to compare it to isn't a Resident Evil movie
Resident Evil opens Friday, and Wednesday’s tracking says Sony is about to erase a record that has stood in this franchise since 2010. The number that predicts it, though, isn’t anywhere in the franchise — it belongs to the film Zach Cregger made before this one.
Boxoffice Pro put its weekend forecast out on Wednesday, two days before Sony opens Resident Evil: a domestic range of $40M–$50M on a 24% share of all showtimes in the country. For this franchise, that is not a good weekend. That is a different league.
Seven Resident Evil films have come out over 25 years, and their opening weekends run from $13M to $26M. The ceiling belongs to Resident Evil: Afterlife in 2010, which opened to $26.6M and finished with $60.1M domestic. If the forecast lands anywhere in its range, the reboot beats that opening by Friday night and takes the franchise's all-time domestic record by its second weekend.
None of which means the old numbers predict anything. Zach Cregger's film keeps Raccoon City and drops every character the games and the Milla Jovovich series were built on — no Jill, no Leon, no Alice. The Jovovich run made $1.27B worldwide on exactly what this one doesn't have.
The film that actually predicts this one
The useful comparison isn't a Resident Evil movie at all. Cregger's Barbarian did $40.8M domestic in total; Weapons opened to $43.5M last year and finished at $151.57M. The forecast is, in plain terms, a Weapons-sized opening with a video game logo on it. Sony is selling the director, not the brand.
Cregger, for his part, has been telling anyone who asks that this is temporary.
"If there's one thing that is the law of Hollywood, it's that what goes up must come down. These things are very, very temporary… I am not Martin Scorsese. I am just me."
The reviews aren't arguing. The embargo lifted Wednesday at noon Eastern and the film sits at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Hollywood Reporter said Austin Abrams "practically delivers a one-man show" as Bryan, a medical courier whose night delivery to Raccoon City General goes the way you would expect.
What Sony is putting in front of audiences
- 90 minutes, rated R, in theaters September 18 — short enough to fit an extra showtime per screen, which is part of that 24% share.
- An original story written by Cregger and Shay Hatten (John Wick: Chapter 4), with a courier instead of a special-ops squad.
- Fewer jokes than Cregger wanted. Test audiences said the horror movie was too funny, so he cut them: "there's not a single joke I took out of this movie that I miss."
- A night shoot in the north of the Czech Republic, where Cregger had pneumonia for the first half of production and a bacterial infection for the second.
The other half of the math is overseas: previous entries made multiples of their domestic totals abroad, and Boxoffice Pro expects those markets to carry the reboot deep into October.
A Resident Evil movie with no Jill, no Leon and no Alice is tracking to out-open all seven that had them.
Friday settles it. The number to watch isn't $40M or $50M — it's $26.6M, and how early on Saturday morning the reboot has already passed it.
Earlier we wrote: Brie Larson meets her dead mother in One Italian Summer: Paramount release date, cast and first plot details
