The live-action Resident Evil film reboot, directed by Zach Cregger, has seen an impressive box-office performance for its opening weekend, having made around $108.3 million worldwide. This also happens to make it the best-performing movie in the Resident Evil franchise so far.
As caught by IGN, the film brought in $60 million in the domestic US box office, and $48.3 million from international markets. The impressive performance has even outdone initial projections, which expected the movie to make between $40 million and $50 million in the domestic box office for its opening weekend.
There are likely many factors that contributed to the success of Cregger’s movie, and a strong critical reception also likely helped quite a bit. At the time of publishing, the film has a 95 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 91 percent audience rating. Many have praised the Resident Evil film for being able to accurately capture what makes the game franchise so popular, and some reviews also praised the balance of comedy and horror that the movie is able to find.
Cregger has been quite vocal in the run up to the film’s release that he didn’t want to directly adapt any of the Resident Evil games. Rather, he wanted to tell an original story that would accurately capture the atmosphere and vibes of the survival horror franchise. This means that, in his own words, Cregger took quite a few liberties when it came to the movie’s setting.
“It’s not 1998. It takes place in modern times. I know that, during the events of Resident Evil 2, it’s not snowing, and yet, in this movie, I thought it would be better for the story and for the visuals, you know, whatever I’m doing, if it were snowy. It’s going to be a better movie for it.”
He went on to explain that he didn’t want to use any of the iconic characters from the games because he didn’t believe he could do it better than how Capcom portrayed them.
“I am not trying to adapt a video game. I’m not using the characters from the games. I’m not telling a story that the games tell because I’m not going to be able to do it better than the games. The games are so well executed, and to me, Leon and Claire and these characters, they exist so perfectly in the games that anyone I cast and any difference that I do with them would be, probably, to the detriment of what I was trying to do.”
Just last month, Cregger also spoke about how much he loves the Resident Evil games, and how hard he worked along with the production crew to make sure that the film can capture the feeling of playing one of the games.
“The games always kind of have this progression where you start with a pistol, and then you graduate to a shotgun, and then you graduate to a machine gun. There’s a lot of items from the games. [The protagonist] is constantly coming up against these padlocks that are stopping him from progressing.”
