Cregger's Resident Evil doubled the franchise's best-ever opening — and beat his own Weapons
Zach Cregger's reboot took the domestic top spot with the biggest opening the Resident Evil films have ever had.
Right, so here we are: Zach Cregger has apparently just pulled off a small miracle at the box office. His Resident Evil reboot has gone straight in at number one in the States, and it’s not just done well — it’s given the entire franchise a boot up the backside, breaking its own records in the process. And yes, astonishingly, it’s managed to outdo the director’s previous hit, Weapons, which was hardly a failure itself.
Resident Evil smashed the previous best domestic opening for the franchise, raking in $60 million in its first weekend in the US alone.
The Numbers Game
To put all this into perspective, expectations for Resident Evil were hovering around the $40 to $50 million mark for its opening weekend in America. Instead, the film pulled in $60 million just from the US, and then another $48.3 million from international screens. That’s a combined $108.3 million worldwide in a single weekend. Not too shabby for a slice of monster chaos.
Even more impressive when you look back at Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010), which was the old record-holder with $26.6 million. Cregger’s new version has more than doubled that. His previous outing, Weapons, debuted at $43.5 million domestically and quietly went on to bank $270 million worldwide by the end of its run. If nothing else, Cregger knows how to pull in a crowd.
Studio Gamble Pays Off
It’s not like Sony played it safe here. They spent $75 million on this eighth instalment — the second time they’ve tried to restart the brand. You might recall their first modern attempt, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City in 2021, didn’t exactly set the world alight. That one managed just $42 million globally on a $25 million budget, so a much less happy story altogether.
This time around there’s been a surprising amount of love — critics and audiences both seem quite taken with the reboot. Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting at 96%, and people coming out of the cinema gave it a B+ on CinemaScore, which is about as positive as horror gets these days. Apparently, hiring Cregger was the right call.
It helps to have a cast that’s game for it as well. This time the star is Austin Abrams as a medical courier who gets to dash about Raccoon City, dealing with viral nasties and a fair bit more than his job description probably covered. Abrams actually worked with Cregger before on Weapons, so clearly there’s some trust there.
Cregger’s Horror Reign
The big picture here is that Cregger, who started with 2022’s Barbarian (which surprised everyone at the time), is now fully established as one of horror’s new bankable directors. He’s made Sony look very clever, and the studio is likely hoping the film keeps running up those numbers thanks to strong word-of-mouth. For context, Resident Evil was the only wide release this weekend, which probably didn’t hurt, but still — you’ve got to actually get people interested enough to show up, and he’s done exactly that.