With “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” hitting $1 billion and “Street Fighter” and “Sonic the Hedgehog 4” among the films on the horizon, we are well into this new era of video games as a potent force at the box office. But Sony/Columbia’s “Resident Evil” is taking a different approach that, if successful, could expand the potential for this form of IP filmmaking.
Sony has been riding high at the box office as “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” just became the unadjusted all-time domestic box office record holder with $937 million in the U.S. and Canada, but unlike that Marvel Studios title, “Resident Evil” is a title they co-produced.
Sharing the horror film’s reported $75 million budget with Constantin Films, Davis Films and Vertigo Entertainment, Sony is looking to match or exceed the box office run of director Zach Cregger’s 2025 breakout hit “Weapons,” which opened to $43.5 million and grossed $151.5 million domestic and $270 million worldwide.
Signs point to that happening as projections had “Resident Evil” opening to at least $40 million this weekend, and that was before strong early reviews gave the film a 96% Rotten Tomatoes score on Wednesday morning. Critics have hailed Cregger for making a video game film that focuses more on how it feels to play a “Resident Evil” game rather than faithfully recreate its lore like the 2021 flop “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.”
Up to this point, the video game franchises that have enjoyed the most success at the box office — think “Mario,” “Sonic,” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s” — have primarily been mascot driven titles where the primary appeal of those games is their iconic characters and worlds, and thus the big draw of their film adaptations is seeing that on the big screen. Last year’s near-billion hit “A Minecraft Movie,” minted a new meme in “chicken jockey” through that formula.
But Cregger, fresh off last year’s acclaimed film “Weapons,” isn’t going down that path. His movie loosely adapts the premise of the 1998 game “Resident Evil 2,” where a bioweapon virus created by the shadowy Umbrella Corporation causes a zombie outbreak in the fictional Raccoon City. But unlike the game, his film isn’t set in 1998 nor does it have game protagonists Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield as its leads.
Instead, the film follows a medical courier named Bryan who is caught in the crossfire during the outbreak and must fight to survive. While there are references to the games, Cregger said he wanted to focus more on how it feels to play Capcom’s survival horror series, focusing on problems like searching for precious ammo, exploring dark and abandoned environments where monsters can lurk around every corner, and seemingly simple objectives that turn into gory, nightmarish journeys.
“I love the resource management aspect of the games and it was really important to me to bring that to the movie,” Cregger said in a Reddit AMA. “You will know how many bullets are in his gun. You will care when he misses a shot. That’s one of the things that makes the games feel so intense and it translates really well into the film, in my opinion.”
This looser approach to video game adaptation isn’t entirely new. Jonathan Nolan and the writers behind Prime Video’s streaming series “Fallout” took a somewhat similar approach, firmly setting its series in the universe of Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic series but basing its plot around new, original characters. But Cregger takes it a step further with only a precious few mentions of Raccoon City and the Umbrella Corporation and some visual easter eggs of “Resident Evil” game elements like the typewriter save points. But unlike the “Mario” movies, the film never lingers or calls attention to them.
That fanservice-lite approach might turn off a portion of the “Resident Evil” faithful, but if critics and early social media reception are any indication, the word-of-mouth may still be carried by horror fans in general who have already embraced Cregger after his work on “Weapons” and “Barbarian.”
The filmmaker’s first foray into IP comes just as he has become a recognized name in horror, blending effective jump scares and strong lead performances with a dark sense of humor influenced by Sam Raimi and Cregger’s own work with the sketch comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know. All of that is in play here, combined with body horror and gory monster moments that will likely satisfy fans of the genre no matter how much “Resident Evil” they have played.
Even if the opening weekend crowd leans more towards RE fans rather than general horror lovers, word-of-mouth among the latter should give “Resident Evil” the fuel to leg out as a Halloween offering in an October that is surprisingly light on major studio horror compared to years past. The only direct competition is coming from Universal/Blumhouse’s Jessica Chastain title “Other Mommy,” which opens on Oct. 9.
For years, “Resident Evil” had a theatrical presence in the form of Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich’s series of action films, which were critically maligned but mostly were box office hits with a franchise total of $1.27 billion worldwide. The highest grossing of those films was 2010’s “Resident Evil: Afterlife,” which grossed $300 million worldwide before inflation adjustment and opened to $26.6 million, which roughly equates to $40.9 million in 2026 dollars.
If Cregger’s “Resident Evil” can outperform those films and become a hit for Sony that it doesn’t have to share credit on with another major studio, it will do so at a time when it is about to ramp up its video game adaptation output with Wes Ball’s “The Legend of Zelda” next spring along with a slew of adaptations the studio is planning with Playstation-owned games such as the 2028 film “Bloodborne.”
It seems obvious to say, but video games are not comic books or novels. They require their own approach to film adaptation, and Hollywood is still figuring out the parameters of that now that the distrust that gamers largely felt towards video game films after busts like “Prince of Persia” has now diminished. But a successful “Resident Evil” could show that with the right filmmaker and creative vision, more artistic liberties could be taken with certain games while still achieving box office success.