Box Office Report: Cregger’s Resident Evil Adaptation Smashes Franchise Record

Following Curry Barker’s achievements with his supernatural sophomore feature Obsession and Kane Parsons’ debut Backrooms, which smashed its budget through ticket sales, the horror genre is seeing additional box office success this year, as director Zach Cregger’s latest contribution to the genre has instantly proven a box office hit. Following 2022’s Barbarian and 2025’s Weapons, the horror filmmaker’s third film, Resident Evil, the latest adaptation of the horror survival game series of the same name and the second reboot, has broken a box office record for the horror franchise at its debut weekend.

The film, starring Weapons and Euphoria star Austin Abrams, is set in the timeline of the second Resident Evil game from 1998 and follows a medical courier trapped in a horrific battle for survival in Raccoon City as a deadly outbreak sweeps through and mutates civilians into terrifying, bloodthirsty mutants. Additional cast members include Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Johnno Wilson and Paul Walter Hauser.

Cregger’s take on the Resident Evil franchise has debuted at the box office with a worldwide gross of $108 million, accumulated from domestic ticket sales of $60 million and international ones of $48 million, meaning the film has made $33 million more than its budget. These numbers place the film as the best-performing opening weekend in the franchise, following previous installments (directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, Alexander Witta and Russell Mulcahy) opening to $20 million and the last attempt at bringing the game to the big screen, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, failing at the box office with a $5.3 million opening.

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The director’s first film, starring Georgina Campbell and Bill Skarsgård, opened to domestic sales of $10 million and international sales of $5.3 million, for a total of $15.3 million. Weapons, featuring Julie Garner, Josh Brolin, Benedict Wong and Amy Madigan, opened to $43.5 million in US sales and $17.5 million overseas, placing Resident Evil as his top performance for a debut weekend.

FranchiseRe’s David A. Gross cited this as “a big comeback after the previous episode stumbled during the pandemic,” meanwhile Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst at Rentrak, placed Cregger’s placement as “in charge of a major franchise like Resident Evil [made] something familiar feel fresh and original again.”

Meanwhile, Practical Magic 2 came in second place, tallying another $12 million in US sales to add to its domestic gross of $50 million. The film, a sequel to the 1998 fantasy flick starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, has earned an additional $26.8 million overseas to reach a current global total of $76.8 million, following a debut weekend of $46 million.

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Ros Tibbs

Editor

Ros is a film and lit graduate writing news and reviews at The People's Magazine. She also writes long-form film theory, film history, analytical or curated recommendations pieces on other platforms.

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