Key Takeaways
- Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is sitting at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, the best reviewed movie in the franchise’s history by a mile.
- It opened to $60 million domestic, a franchise-best debut, and has already crossed $108 million worldwide.
- This is Cregger’s third horror swing in a row after Barbarian and Weapons, and he hasn’t missed yet.
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The Review
I went into this one cautious. Video game movies have burned me too many times to count, and Resident Evil specifically has a rough track record. The Milla Jovovich era was fun in a dumb action movie way but it had nothing to do with the games I grew up playing on PS1. So when I heard Zach Cregger was taking a swing at this, I was cautiously optimistic. He delivered.
This is easily the best Resident Evil movie ever made, and it’s not close. Cregger follows Bryan, a medical courier played by Austin Abrams, who gets stuck in Raccoon City the night everything goes to hell. Ninety minutes of tight, propulsive terror. No bloat, no forty minutes of exposition before the first zombie shows up. It moves like a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be.
Watch the trailer I broke down when it dropped and you can already feel the DNA of the games in there. The finished movie delivers on that promise.
Why It Actually Works
Cregger gets something a lot of directors miss when they adapt a video game. It’s not about hitting reference points and calling it a day. It’s about making the audience feel the way you feel when you’re playing the game. Low on ammo, cornered, one wrong move from getting torn apart. He nails that feeling in a way none of the earlier Resident Evil movies even attempted.
The jump scares hit clean too. They surprise you without feeling like the movie is cheating to get a reaction. And there’s real comedy woven in that never undercuts the tension. Austin Abrams has genuinely great timing, and it gives the movie room to breathe between the terror instead of just being wall to wall dread.
This is also the third horror movie in a row Cregger has knocked out of the park, after Barbarian and Weapons. At this point calling it a fluke isn’t an option. The guy just gets horror.
The Cast
Austin Abrams carries the movie as Bryan, and he’s got the right mix of panic and dry humor to make you actually root for a normal guy stuck in the worst night of his life. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser round out the cast, and Hauser in particular is doing exactly what you’d hope, bringing weird, off-kilter energy to a genre that usually plays it straight.
The Box Office Numbers
The movie opened to $60 million domestic from 3,684 theaters, the best debut in Resident Evil franchise history by a wide margin. Worldwide it’s already past $108 million. For a Sony horror release with no huge marquee names, that’s a massive result, and it says the audience was hungry for a version of this that actually respects the source material. If you missed the numbers when they hit, I covered the full breakdown in my box office record post.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Resident Evil (2026) good?
Yes. It’s sitting at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and is widely considered the best Resident Evil movie ever made, thanks to Zach Cregger’s direction.
Who stars in the new Resident Evil movie?
Austin Abrams leads the cast as Bryan, a medical courier caught in the outbreak, alongside Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser.
Is Resident Evil (2026) connected to the video games?
It’s set in Raccoon City during a viral outbreak, pulling directly from the survival horror DNA of the original games rather than following one specific game’s plot beat for beat.
How much did Resident Evil (2026) make at the box office?
It opened to $60 million domestically, a franchise-best debut, and has crossed $108 million worldwide.
