By the Numbers: Video Game Movies Went From a 30% Punchline to a 96% Record in Under Five Years

19 days ago by Jordan Blake 5 min read

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Resident Evil (2002) scored 36%. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021) scored 30%. Resident Evil (2026) just scored 96% on 205 reviews, the highest any video game adaptation has ever held. But the 2026 slate also produced a 64% and a 59%, and the most faithful film in the franchise scored lower than the one fans said ignored the games. Here is what the whole score series actually shows.

Three numbers, one franchise, twenty-four years: 36%, 30%, 96%.

Same source material. Same studio brand. Same zombies, same Umbrella Corporation, same Raccoon City. The 2002 film scored 36% on Rotten Tomatoes. The 2021 reboot scored 30%. The 2026 reboot scored 96% and is now the best-reviewed video game adaptation ever made.

Let me show you what the rest of the numbers reveal, because the story everyone is telling about this weekend is the wrong one.

The franchise ladder

Every figure below was read off the Rotten Tomatoes page today, review counts included — because a percentage without a denominator is a rumour.

• Resident Evil (2002): 36% Tomatometer on 162 reviews. Audience 67% from 250,000+ ratings.
• Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021): 30% on 92 reviews. Audience 65%.
• Resident Evil (2026): 96% on 205 reviews. Audience 91%.

Now hold that middle entry up to the light, because it is the single most useful data point in this whole conversation and nobody is talking about it.

The 2021 film is the most faithful adaptation the franchise has ever produced. It adapted the first two games more or less directly. It put Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Claire Redfield and Albert Wesker on screen with their names intact. It was the fan-service version, made explicitly as a corrective to the Paul W. S. Anderson films that fans complained had ignored the games.

Faithfulness bought it a 30% — below the 36% of the 2002 film that fans said ignored the games, and squarely inside the 18–39% band the Anderson sequels already occupied. The corrective scored like the thing it was correcting.

Where 96% actually sits

Here is the genre ladder as it stands today, again with review counts:

• Resident Evil (2026): 96% on 205 reviews
• Exit 8 (2025): 91% on 176 reviews
• Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024): 86% on 152 reviews
• Pokemon Detective Pikachu (2019): 68% on 317 reviews
• Mortal Kombat II (2026): 64% on 203 reviews
• Iron Lung (2026): 59% on 49 reviews
• A Minecraft Movie (2025): 47% on 195 reviews
• Super Mario Bros. (1993): 26% on 46 reviews
• Postal (2007): 9% on 45 reviews
• BloodRayne (2005): 4% on 51 reviews
• Alone in the Dark (2005): 1% on 120 reviews

That bottom cluster is three Uwe Boll films in a row. One percent. On a hundred and twenty reviews. That is not a small sample producing a freak result — that is a hundred and twenty professional critics reaching near-unanimity, and it is the reason this genre spent twenty years as shorthand for garbage.

One honest caveat on comparing the top of that list to the bottom: the modern entries at the top carry 150–317 reviews, while three of the four floor films carry 45–51 — Alone in the Dark's 120 is the exception, which is exactly why its 1% is the most damning number on the list. Rotten Tomatoes aggregates more outlets now than it did in 2005. The direction of the trend is real. The precision of any two-point comparison across those eras is not.

The second 2026 data point does not say what you were told it says

The tidy version of this story pairs Resident Evil with Iron Lung — Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach's self-financed, self-distributed horror film, adapted from his own game — as proof that 2026 is the year the curse broke.

The commercial half of that holds up beautifully:

• Production budget: $3,000,000 as reported. Fischbach himself has put it higher, at "a little over $4 million" and "just under $5 million" — so treat the multiple as a range, not a point.
• Opening weekend: $18,190,786
• Domestic: $41,111,208
• International: $10,114,965
• Worldwide: $51,226,173
• Return on the reported budget: 17.1x. At Fischbach's own higher figure, roughly 11x.

A YouTuber wrote, directed, starred in, paid for and distributed a film that returned somewhere between eleven and seventeen times its cost, with no studio, no legacy cast and no franchise. That is a genuine structural event.

But it is not a critical one. Iron Lung scored 59% on 49 reviews. Metacritic has it at 54. That is not a record, it is not a breakthrough, and it is almost exactly where this genre has always lived. Anyone citing it as evidence that critics have changed their mind about video game movies has not looked at its score.

And note the date: January 30, 2026. That is eight months ago, not this weekend.

So what do the high scorers actually share?

Look at the top three again — 96%, 91%, 86% — and at who made them.

Zach Cregger made Resident Evil after Barbarian and Weapons. Genki Kawamura made Exit 8, in Japanese, from a game that is literally a man walking down a corridor. Jeff Fowler made Sonic the Hedgehog 3. In all three cases a studio handed a director with an actual voice a piece of IP and let them make the film they wanted to make out of it.

Now look at the middle of the ladder: A Minecraft Movie at 47%, Mortal Kombat II at 64%, Welcome to Raccoon City at 30%. These are adaptations built from a checklist — the characters are present, the locations are present, the iconography is present, and the filmmaking is downstream of all of it.

The variable that moves the Tomatometer is not the rating, the budget, or the fidelity. It is whether a director was given room. The 2021 film proves the negative case inside a single franchise: maximum fidelity, and a score indistinguishable from the films it was made to correct.

Is the curse broken?

No. It is bifurcated, and the 2026 slate proves it inside one calendar year.

Three video game adaptations released in 2026 have scored 96%, 64% and 59%. That is one masterpiece, one mid, and one that is fine. The genre did not rise — its ceiling did. The floor is no longer 1%, which is real progress, but the middle of this genre is still sitting in the 50s and 60s, exactly where it has always been.

What actually changed in under five years is not that video game movies got good. It is that the best one is now allowed to be genuinely great, and that took a director being allowed to throw out every character on the box art.

Thirty percent for the faithful one. Ninety-six for the one with nobody you recognise in it. The numbers have been telling studios this since 2021. Most of them still are not listening.