Sightlines · reception
How Resident Evil was received
2026 · Zach Cregger · Resident Evil on Sightlines
The arc
Pre-release lore grumbling evaporated on contact with the reviews: 96% on Rotten Tomatoes from 299 critics, 79 on Metacritic, and a B+ CinemaScore that Wikipedia notes is the best any Resident Evil film has earned. It opened to a franchise-record $60 million domestic ($108.3 million global) on a $75 million budget, became the first film in the series to cross $100 million domestic, and is now the franchise's highest-grossing entry worldwide.
What’s debated
The fight was fidelity versus reinvention: a viral X post dismissed the Leon-and-Nemesis-free teaser as a generic horror movie wearing the Resident Evil name, while Cregger countered that filming the games' story straight would disappoint the diehards most of all.
Its footprint
TheWrap's William Bibbiani supplied the pull-quote energy, declaring it not just a great video game movie but a great movie outright, and We Got This Covered said no director has ever understood a game series so well. The numbers became the other story: a franchise-best debut, the first $100 million domestic run in the series, and per a FandomWire snippet the highest-rated horror film of 2026.
Where it stands
It is only weeks old, but it already stands as the franchise's critical and commercial peak, and critics like TheWrap's are treating it as the film that cements Cregger as a modern master of horror, even as he says his next move is the original sci-fi project The Flood.
Did you know? Cregger told the PlayStation Blog that Resident Evil 4 was the game he played most, so he mimicked its healing items exactly and put them in the film, and Wikipedia reports he cut jokes after test audiences found the movie too funny.
Named by the director
- Evil Dead II (1987) — Cregger said he wanted to turn his brain off and make something like Evil Dead 2, getting crazy with the camera, and that the film would resemble it rather than his prior work.