If the embed won’t play, Sony’s teaser trailer is also here on YouTube.
Raccoon City has been rezoned for residential use. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is now available to buy and rent digitally, having just finished a cinema run that took it past $400 million worldwide. That makes it the most successful film the franchise has ever produced, comfortably clear of the $312 million that Resident Evil: The Final Chapter made in 2016, and by a distance the biggest hit of Cregger’s career: Weapons took about $270 million, Barbarian about $46 million. Not bad for a film with a reported $75 million budget whose hero can’t work a shotgun.
In the US, the film sells for $24.99 on the major digital storefronts, with rental at premium prices, and it has been rolling out on Apple TV, Prime Video and the rest market by market. Physical media is less settled. SlashFilm reports DVD, Blu-ray and 4K UHD on 29 December, with extras including a featurette called “Game Changer: Directing Resident Evil” and a Cregger commentary, though we haven’t seen Sony confirm the date. Anyone holding out for a longer cut can stand down, because Cregger has said there won’t be one. In America, its first subscription home should be Netflix, under Sony’s existing deal, with no date announced.
The numbers are all the more satisfying because the film spent its whole marketing campaign being shouted at. When the first teaser arrived in April, a vocal slice of fandom wanted Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine and a faithful tour of the Spencer mansion. What it got was Bryan, a medical courier played by Austin Abrams, driving into the outskirts of Raccoon City on the night Resident Evil 2 goes horribly wrong. Cregger’s stated aim was to capture what playing the games feels like rather than retell them, and audiences went along with it. The film opened to $108.3 million worldwide, the franchise’s best start, with a Rotten Tomatoes score in the mid-nineties that made it, at the time, the site’s best-reviewed video game film. Pause on that sentence for a moment. A Resident Evil film, best-reviewed. The Milla Jovovich era would have needed a sit down and a sweet tea.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we were cheerfully mugged by it, as our review testified: practical creature work that owes a large debt to The Thing, and a lead whose main weapon is panic. The obvious next question is a sequel. Cregger first said this would be his only Resident Evil film, and has since told IGN he’d be willing to “have a hand” in future ones. Nothing is official, and his next project is reportedly The Flood. But Sony now has 400 million reasons to keep the lights on in Raccoon City, and Umbrella would be the first to tell you that nothing says shareholder value like an outbreak that refuses to stay contained.
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