UPDATE 9/20: The floor held and the ceiling broke. Resident Evil opened to $60 million.
UPDATE 9/16: Premiere reactions call it one of the best video game movies ever made, and the reviews came in at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.
UPDATE 9/15: The final survey landed as promised, and it points past Weapons.
The first projection is in, and it starts at a franchise record.
Deadline reports Resident Evil landed on distributor tracking September 3 with a $35 million projection for its September 18 opening weekend.
That number alone would be the biggest domestic opening in the series’ history.
The old mark is Resident Evil: Afterlife at $26.6 million in 2010, set when post-Avatar 3D pricing was inflating everything.
Seven movies, $1.27 billion worldwide, and none of them opened to $35 million.
And the trade says the floor may be low.
Per Deadline, first-day ticket sales came in huge and could push the forecast much higher, with $50 million in play.
Day One Presales Did The Talking
Those first-day sales came out of September 1, when tickets went on sale in the middle of Sony’s stacked day: the three-city screenings, Cregger’s live Reddit AMA, the back catalog hitting Netflix.
The Quorum survey said the demand was real, with Resident Evil at 51 percent interest, the highest of anything in tracking.
The presale window was the first place that number could turn into money, and per Deadline, it did.
The demo detail matches too.
Deadline reports the movie is strongest with men under 25 in first choice, then men over 25, and that its first-choice score runs well ahead of what Weapons, Alien: Romulus, and 28 Years Later posted.
Those movies opened to $43.5 million, $42 million, and $30 million, three of the biggest horror launches of the past two years.
The $35 Million To $50 Million Question
Deadline’s one caution is Mortal Kombat II.
Resident Evil‘s first choice trails what that movie posted by 23 percent, and MK2 tracked at $50 million back in May before opening to $38.5 million.
The question the trade raises is whether Cregger’s movie plays past the core game fans.
The reach question already has an answer in the survey data.
The Quorum polls everyday moviegoers, not game fans, and Resident Evil leads its entire board on both awareness and interest.
The name doing that work is Cregger’s.
Deadline credits the genre and the fervor around the director after Weapons, which played to $151.5 million domestic and $270 million worldwide on its way to Oscar gold.
Nobody bought those tickets for a video game.
And the runway isn’t done.
Two more weeks of presales, the reviews still to come, and the final Quorum chart before release lands around September 15 with the September 1 blitz counted in it.
Deadline also pegs Practical Magic 2 at a $40 million-plus start for September 11, so September gets two big openers back to back.
For Resident Evil, the floor is a franchise record.
The ceiling is what the next two weeks of presales decide.
Resident Evil opens in theaters and IMAX September 18, directed by Zach Cregger from a script he co-wrote with Shay Hatten, and starring Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser. For the full tracking series, see our latest Quorum breakdown.
