The horror film Resident Evil topped the North American box office during its opening weekend, taking 60 million dollars from 3684 cinemas in the United States and Canada.
The film records the franchise’s best opening
The film recorded the best opening for the franchise inspired by the popular video game since it moved to the cinema in 2002, based on studio estimates reported by The Associated Press. It marks the franchise’s return after seven previous films and gave its director Zach Cregger the best opening of his career, following the horror films Barbarian and Weapons.
The first three days’ takings exceeded the total earned by most previous instalments during their entire domestic runs, with the exception of Resident Evil: Afterlife, which ended its North American run in 2010 with 60.1 million dollars, without adjusting for inflation.
Austin Abrams leads the new film as a medical courier whose final night shift turns into a confrontation with infected creatures in Raccoon City. The film renews Abrams’ collaboration with Cregger, after the actor previously appeared in the director’s film Weapons. The commercial success was accompanied by a positive critical reception, with the film receiving a 95% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Worldwide takings exceed 100 million dollars
In international markets, the film took an additional 48.3 million dollars, bringing its worldwide opening total to 108.3 million dollars. The film franchise began in 2002 with a more contained story than the devastated world that took shape across the following six films.
In the first instalment, Alice, played by Milla Jovovich, wakes up with no memory and finds herself connected to a secret underground facility run by Umbrella, one of the largest and most influential organisations in the film’s world. A virus developed by the company leaks, turning the facility’s workers into savage creatures as a small group of humans tries to escape before the infection spreads.
That beginning established the conflict that drove the first six films. Alice was not only facing monsters; she was also searching for her identity and trying to understand what Umbrella had done to her, and whether her body and memories still belonged to her. An analysis published by the British Film Institute described Alice’s journey as an ongoing search to reclaim her body and identity from the company’s grip.
The idea continued to change and expand as the franchise progressed, alongside the story’s move from a sealed facility to an entire city and then to a world in which most institutions had collapsed. Behind the chases and horror scenes, the first film posed an ethical question about the fate of human beings when their lives become raw material in a scientific and commercial project.
Umbrella carries the disaster to Raccoon City
Umbrella did not develop the virus by accident. It worked on weapons, biotechnology and cloning, and when the disaster struck, its employees and the city’s residents became part of an experiment they could not control. In 2004, Resident Evil: Apocalypse moved the disaster from the secret facility to Raccoon City.
The danger was no longer confined to a group of workers inside a laboratory but expanded to threaten an entire city, while Umbrella tried to contain the consequences of its experiments. As the events grew in scale, the franchise’s human dimension changed. Those confronting the infection were no longer only scientists or soldiers; families, children and ordinary residents appeared, trying to leave a city whose fate was controlled by the most powerful organisation.
The film presents Leon searching for his daughter amid the chaos, making his help for survivors dependent on their efforts to reach her. The father-daughter relationship thus becomes a central element in a story that appears on the surface to be about monsters and chases. Along the way, Alice discovers that Umbrella’s experiments on her have changed her body and given her abilities she did not previously possess.
The franchise moves from infection to collective survival and bodily identity
Those abilities become a weapon that helps her fight, but they also remain evidence that another organisation altered her body without her consent, making the body itself a battleground. Resident Evil: Extinction expanded the scale of the devastation again in 2007. Raccoon City was no longer the only place to have collapsed; the world had become an almost dead land, and survivors travelled in convoys in search of water, food and safety, while Umbrella continued its experiments on the virus and on Alice clones.
At this point, the franchise moved from the horror of infection to the question of collective survival after the collapse of cities and institutions. Society became a small group of people dependent on one another, while food, fuel and shelter became the foundations of their relationships.
At the same time, the company continued seeking control of the virus, even after the world that technology was supposed to serve had collapsed. Cloning also acquired a meaning beyond its use as a scientific plot device. Alice confronted copies of her body that could be manufactured, used and then discarded, while holding to the idea that memory, personality and the ability to choose are what make a person an individual, rather than merely a body that can be replicated.
Resident Evil: Afterlife, released in 2010, continued to follow the survivors as they searched for a place called Arcadia, which they believed was a sanctuary free of infection. The journey became an attempt to find a community where humans could begin again, after the institutions that had shaped the old world had almost disappeared.
In this instalment, the relationship between Alice, Claire Redfield and the other survivors became more important, and heroism was no longer tied solely to the main character’s survival. As Alice became more capable of fighting monsters, her responsibility for people less powerful than her grew, and her role gradually shifted from lone fighter to a woman trying to carry others to safety.
The fifth instalment, Resident Evil: Retribution, released in 2012, moved into stranger territory. Alice wakes inside a facility belonging to Umbrella, containing artificial environments and cloned characters that the company uses to simulate the spread of biological weapons. In one of the simulations, Alice finds herself living a domestic life with a girl called Becky, who regards her as her mother.
That artificial life quickly collapses, but Alice clings to the child and tries to save her even after discovering that the world that brought them together was merely an experiment created by the company. The relationship introduced a human question about how much a family needs a biological bond in order to become real.
Alice herself is a character whose body and memory have been tampered with, while Becky belongs to a simulation created by a commercial organisation. Yet their relationship derives its value from care and choice, not from the circumstances that created their existence. This layer led some later critical readings to treat Retribution as more than an action film. Alice was viewed through the tension between violence and motherhood, as well as between an identity imposed on a person by others and one chosen for oneself.
Alice’s story reached its conclusion in Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, released across different markets in 2016 and 2017. By then, only a few thousand uninfected humans remained on Earth, and Alice returned to the Umbrella facility where the story began, seeking an antidote capable of destroying the virus. The return closed the circle that had begun six films earlier.
The woman who woke without her memory and tried to discover who she was ultimately faced the possibility of sacrificing her life to save the humans who remained. The antidote also posed a danger to her because the infection was present in her body, making the salvation of others dependent on the possibility of her death. The film also reveals that the disaster was not merely the result of a scientific error but was linked to decisions made by Umbrella’s leadership.
The franchise thus takes its idea of power to its furthest point, as Alice changes over six films from a woman searching for her name and past into a character who bears responsibility for the survival of others. After Alice’s journey ended, the 2021 film Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City attempted to return the franchise to its roots.
The film abandoned Alice and brought back several characters from the games, including Claire and Chris Redfield, Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine. It shifted the story from a world facing its end to a small city living under Umbrella before the company’s experiments turned into a disaster. The film also restored the relationship between siblings Claire and Chris and revisited an old question about a society whose economy depends on an organisation that also has the power to destroy it.
But the attempt to reboot the franchise did not achieve a major commercial opening, and its cinematic run stopped again until Zach Cregger offered his different approach five years later. Cregger’s new film does not bring back Alice or place one of the best-known game heroes at its centre. Instead, it begins with a relatively ordinary man who transports medical supplies before finding himself trapped in Raccoon City amid the spread of the infection.
This choice returns the franchise to the predicament of a person with limited strength and resources facing a world collapsing around him. The film’s structure relies on dwindling resources and the character’s movement from one increasingly dangerous task to the next. Critics said these elements bring the film closer to the nature of the Resident Evil gaming experience without literally transferring a single game’s story.
With this approach, the franchise returns in 2026 to a simpler point after a 24-year journey. It began in 2002 with a woman who woke without knowing her identity, then expanded to address corporate power, biological experiments, the collapse of society and the search for family and identity, before placing an ordinary person at the centre of its new film as he tries to preserve his humanity while struggling to stay alive.
