UPDATE 9/2: The answers are in. Cregger revealed a movie that counts his bullets and tracks his health like the games, and first reactions to the opening 30 minutes are hot.
UPDATE 9/4: The blitz paid off. Resident Evil is tracking for a $35 million opening, the biggest in franchise history, with Deadline reporting first-day sales big enough to push it toward $50 million.
UPDATE 9/1: Tickets are on sale now, announced with new Raccoon City and IMAX posters.
UPDATE 9/1: The tracking answered before the push even landed. Resident Evil is back on top of The Quorum’s new chart at 51 percent awareness and 51 percent interest, the best numbers of all fifteen movies on the board. Original article follows.
Sony’s final-stretch campaign for Resident Evil just started, and it started on Reddit.
The studio’s official Reddit account opened a Zach Cregger AMA on r/movies today, and the setup, billed by the subreddit’s moderators as a Reddit world’s first, works like this: Cregger answers questions live on September 1 at 9 pm ET, in front of an audience that has just watched the movie’s first 30 minutes.
Sony is screening Resident Evil that night in Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas, seventeen days before its September 18 release.
Cregger will be in the room in LA, livestreamed to the other two cities, posting his answers into the thread in real time.
Questions are collecting now. The thread cleared 700 upvotes and 350 questions inside its first hour.
Hey r/movies – Zach Cregger here, director of the upcoming Resident Evil film, Weapons, and Barbarian. Ask Me Anything!
by u/SonyPictures in movies
A Hall H Panel With The Movie Attached
Sony’s last big campaign beat was dropping the full trailer hours before Cregger’s Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con.
This is the same play scaled up for release: instead of a trailer and a stage, it’s the movie’s first 30 minutes and a live Q&A piped into the internet’s biggest movie forum.
Studios do not put 30 minutes of a movie in front of public audiences in three cities two and a half weeks early unless they are counting on word of mouth to sell it.
For a director whose first two films, Barbarian and Weapons, ran on exactly that, it is the whole strategy: let the crowd see it, then let the crowd talk.
The first public reactions won’t trickle out through a junket. They land on Reddit that night, in real time, with the director in the room.
Aimed Straight At The Audience Driving The Numbers
The targeting is not subtle.
When The Quorum’s August 4 chart made Resident Evil the hottest movie in tracking, the survey firm’s note said the film had hit new highs on every metric among men under 35 and asked whether Cregger was becoming the next butts-in-seats filmmaker.
Reddit is where that audience lives. Sony just took the campaign to its house.
The first hour of the thread reads like that demo answering back: favorite-game debates, questions about typewriter saves and inventory management making it into the film, a wall of Whitest Kids U’ Know bits, and the skeptics asking why an original story needs the Resident Evil name at all.
Cregger is walking into all of it, live, with the movie as his answer.
It’s the pitch he has made all campaign, that this is a relentless, one-long-sequence horror ride built on dread instead of action. September 1 puts that pitch in front of the crowd that knows the games best.
September 1 Is Sony’s Whole Day
The screenings are one of three things Sony has stacked on that date.
Tickets for the September 18 release went on sale the morning of September 1, made official on the movie’s accounts with new Raccoon City and IMAX posters. The same day, Netflix adds six previous Resident Evil movies to its US library, dropping the back catalog in front of subscribers while presales run.
So the whole sequence lands inside twenty-four hours: the old movies hit Netflix, tickets open, an audience watches the new one, and the director takes questions in public that night.
As for getting into the screenings, Sony has not posted a public RSVP. Passes appear to be going out by code, and one commenter in the AMA thread has already reported the Dallas code isn’t working. Anything official would turn up at the film’s site or Sony’s social accounts.
The film is rated R for strong bloody violence, gore, and language throughout, and runs 94 minutes per AMC’s listing, which is the no-detours sprint Cregger has been describing all campaign.
The Push The Tracking Was Waiting For
The Quorum’s latest chart had Resident Evil‘s awareness and interest cooling off their post-Comic-Con highs, still the best numbers on the board, with Sony’s final stretch still unspent. Days later, here is the first visible beat of that stretch, and it is pointed at the core.
The next chart lands about ten days before release. Nights like September 1 are what move it.
Resident Evil opens in theaters 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. The AMA thread is live now on r/movies, with Cregger’s answers coming September 1 at 9 pm ET.
