UPDATE 9/4: Both records are in play. Resident Evil landed on distributor tracking at $35 million, past Afterlife‘s franchise mark, with Deadline reporting first-day sales that could push it toward $50 million.
UPDATE 9/2: Sony’s big night delivered. First reactions to the opening 30 minutes are hot, and Cregger’s live AMA answers revealed a movie that plays by the games’ rules. Original article follows.
The dip didn’t last long.
The Quorum’s new eight-week tracking chart, published by Puck, has Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil back on top with 51 percent awareness, up one point, and 51 percent interest, up three, seventeen days ahead of its September 18 release.
Both numbers lead all fifteen movies on the board.
And this time, there isn’t a tie.
On awareness, Resident Evil leads the next closest movies — Practical Magic 2 and Street Fighter — by twelve points.
On interest, it clears Paramount’s Brad Pitt survival thriller Heart of the Beast by three points after the two movies were tied at 48 on the previous chart.
That last chart had Resident Evil at 50 awareness and 48 interest, cooling off from its post-Comic-Con highs. That’s over.
Awareness is back at the 51 peak it hit on the August 4 chart, while interest has climbed back to within one point of the 52 it posted that same day.
The Quorum’s own note calls September’s slate encouraging and singles out three movies: Practical Magic 2, Primetime, and Resident Evil.
The firm polls everyday moviegoers every two weeks on two basic questions: do they know the movie exists, and do they want to see it.
Resident Evil Rebounded Before Sony’s Biggest Push
The more interesting part is when the numbers turned back up.
They did it before Sony’s loudest day of the campaign even arrived.
September 1 is Sony’s stacked date: Resident Evil screens tonight in Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas; Cregger answers r/movies questions live at 9 pm ET in a setup billed as a Reddit first; tickets for the wide release went on sale this morning; and six earlier Resident Evil movies hit Netflix today.
None of that is reflected in these numbers yet.
The three-point interest jump came before the main push, with the R rating landing, the ticket date circulating, and the AMA thread opening.
What Sony does today gets measured on the next chart.
Resident Evil Climbs As Street Fighter Drops
The other video game movie on the board is moving in the opposite direction.
Paramount’s Street Fighter, opening October 16, posted the chart’s biggest drops: awareness fell seven points and interest dropped five.
That leaves Resident Evil at 51 awareness and 51 interest while Street Fighter sits at 39 and 39.
One video game reboot is climbing into release with the strongest numbers on the entire chart.
The other is shedding them six weeks out.
51 And 51 With Seventeen Days To Go
For some scale, go back to the comparison we made in August.
The Odyssey sat at 50 percent awareness and 50 percent interest eleven days before release, and it opened north of $120 million.
Resident Evil now beats both tracking numbers with nearly a full week more runway.
Then there are the two records sitting directly in front of it.
The Resident Evil franchise’s best domestic opening remains Afterlife‘s $26.7 million from 2010.
Cregger’s own best is Weapons, which opened to $43.5 million last summer.
Nothing on this chart suggests either number is safe on September 18.
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. For tonight’s three-city screenings and Cregger’s live Reddit Q&A, see our September 1 rundown.
