The Best-Reviewed Resident Evil Movie Ever Made Has None of the Characters You Actually Wanted

23 days ago by Riley Vox 7 min read

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Zach Cregger threw out Leon, Jill, Chris and Claire, cast a medical courier nobody has heard of, and landed a 96% Tomatometer — the highest score any video game movie has ever held. Then it opened to a franchise-record $60 million with a 91% audience score. The fans who spent nine months calling it a betrayal were never the people buying tickets.

Zach Cregger made the best-reviewed video game movie in the history of Rotten Tomatoes, and he did it by refusing to put a single character you know in it.

No Leon. No Jill. No Chris, no Claire, no Wesker, no Alice. Just a guy named Bryan — a medical courier played by Austin Abrams — having the worst night of his life in a town you've never been to, in a timeline that runs parallel to Resident Evil 2 instead of adapting it.

For the better part of a year, the loudest corner of the fandom told anyone who would listen that this was the reason the film would fail. It opened to $60 million.

Look, I want to be careful here, because I have skin in this game and I'll get to that at the end. But first, the scoreboard.

The numbers, before anyone tells you what they mean

• Tomatometer: 96% on 205 reviews — Certified Fresh, the highest critic score any video game movie has ever held on Rotten Tomatoes. Second place is Sonic the Hedgehog 3 at 86%.
• Popcornmeter: 91% from over 2,500 verified ratings. Read that again.
• CinemaScore: B+ — the best grade any Resident Evil film has received in the franchise's 24 years.
• PostTrak: 4.5 out of 5 stars, with definite-recommend running as high as 71%.
• Domestic opening: $60 million from 3,684 theaters, including a $26.3 million Friday. Franchise record.
• Worldwide opening: $108.3 million ($60M domestic, $48.3M international). Franchise record, and Cregger's personal best — Weapons opened to $43.5 million domestic and $71.8 million worldwide last year.
• What Sony expected: $40 million. By Saturday they'd walked it up to $53–55 million. They were still low.
• Budget: $75 million, the most expensive film in the series.
• The record that actually stings: Resident Evil: Afterlife held the domestic crown for the highest-grossing R-rated video game movie for sixteen years, at $60.12 million. That was a lifetime gross. Cregger passed it on Monday.

Audience 91%. Critics 96%. B+ CinemaScore. Those three numbers, sitting next to each other, are the entire story, and I need you to hold onto them for about four paragraphs.

What Cregger actually built

He didn't adapt a game. He adapted the sensation of playing one.

The film is a night in an outbreak from the ground floor: Bryan is not a special forces operative or a STARS veteran, he's a courier with a package and no training, and the movie is structured like the two hours you spend genuinely bad at a survival horror game. He finds a shotgun and then spends an absurd stretch of screen time rummaging through every drawer with a handle looking for shells. Padlocks stop him cold. There are keys. There are green herbs. There are escalating set pieces and one 2,000-pound practical puppet.

Critics kept reaching for the same description — a tribute to the pleasure and the terror of playing a spooky video game, rather than of watching someone else's cutscene. The Umbrella side of the ledger is filled out by Zach Cherry, Paul Walter Hauser and Kali Reis, none of whom are playing anyone from a codex entry.

Here's the thing about that approach: it is only possible if you throw the characters out. Leon Kennedy cannot be bad at this. Jill Valentine cannot panic in a farmhouse for ten minutes looking for ammunition, because Jill Valentine is a professional who has done this in six games. The moment you cast a legacy hero you have imported their competence, and competence is the one thing survival horror cannot survive. The tension in these games has never come from being powerful. It comes from being underequipped and slightly stupid in the dark.

Cregger's own line on this was that shoehorning them in "would feel inorganic to this self-contained story," and that he wasn't going to tell Leon's story because Leon's story is already told, in the games, better than a film could tell it. That is not a dodge. That is the correct read of his own material.

About the "boycott"

I want to be precise, because this framing got away from a lot of people, including the version of this story I originally sat down to write.

There was no organized boycott. What there was — and there was a lot of it — was extremely loud, extremely early backlash: trailer-comment fury, pre-emptive verdicts, a chunk of the fandom announcing the film was disrespectful before a frame of it had been screened. Cregger spent his press run absorbing it. "I think I was naive," he said. "I thought fans of these games, like me, would be thrilled that somebody was coming along and turning Resident Evil into a survival horror movie." At another point: "I feel like I'm running for office, trying to get these people not to call me a LARPer."

He apologized for underestimating how strongly people felt. Fine. Generous, even.

But now go back and look at the 91%.

That Popcornmeter is built from verified ticket buyers — people whose purchase Fandango can confirm. The B+ CinemaScore is polled in the lobby on opening night. PostTrak is an exit survey. Every single audience metric on this film is drawn exclusively from people who went, and every single one of them is high. Meanwhile 66% of that audience was male and 75% of it was under 35, which is to say: the core demographic showed up in force and graded it well.

So what happened to the people who were furious? Some of them bought tickets and had a great time. The rest were never a box office constituency. They were a comments section. The gap between "the fans" and "the people who buy tickets" is the most reliably misread number in this entire industry, and it got misread again, at volume, for nine straight months.

The part where I eat something

In May I wrote a piece arguing that the R-rated video game movie has a hard ceiling — that Mortal Kombat II's franchise-best $40 million opening losing to a second weekend of The Devil Wears Prada 2 was the rule and not the exception, that adult-skewing adaptations cluster in the low $40s and below while the family-friendly ones live between $54 and $146 million, and that no R-rated video game movie had ever crossed that $30 million gap. I said the smart play wasn't more R-rated swings.

I named the upcoming projects that were going to test it anyway. The first one on the list was the Resident Evil reboot.

So: the ceiling broke. $60 million, R-rated, 50% clear of MK2, past Afterlife's sixteen-year lifetime record in a weekend. I was wrong about whether it could be done.

I'd argue I was right about why it hadn't been. My actual claim in May was the characters-versus-brands lever: characters travel to non-fans, brands don't, and Mortal Kombat kept selling a brand. Cregger's move was to stop selling the brand entirely. He didn't put Leon on the poster because Leon is franchise furniture to everyone outside the fanbase — he put a guy having a terrible night on the poster and let the reviews sell the rest. The ceiling was never about the rating. It was about assuming the existing audience was the whole audience.

Verdict

The characters you wanted were the tax. Cregger refused to pay it and got a 96%, a 91%, a franchise record and a genre record out of the savings.

And every studio currently sitting on a beloved IP is right now drawing exactly the wrong lesson from this, which is "make it R-rated." The lesson is: your loudest fans are not your market, and the continuity they're defending is the thing standing between you and a good movie.

I said what I said. I was wrong about the ceiling. I'll take that trade.