Resident Evil Is the Best-Reviewed Horror Film of the Year, and It Just Kept Making Money

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I had written the Resident Evil films off years ago. Six of them, each a little worse than the last, and a franchise that seemed to exist to keep Milla Jovovich in leather. Then Zach Cregger got hold of it, threw out the old continuity, and made a 95-minute original story that opened to about $60 million in September, more than double the previous franchise best. It is still playing. The worldwide total is past $380 million on a $75 million budget, and it crossed $100 million in the US on its own.

The reviews are the strange part. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 95 percent, which makes it the best-reviewed horror film of 2026 and, by a distance, the best-reviewed Resident Evil anything. Audiences gave it a B+ CinemaScore, which for a horror film is excellent. Cregger did the same trick he pulled with Weapons: take a premise everyone thinks they know and keep pulling the rug until you stop guessing.

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What I liked most is how little it cares about the games. There are nods, the mansion and the corporation and a few monster designs, but it is not a tour of references. It is a tight, mean, occasionally very funny film about people trapped somewhere they should not be, and it trusts the audience to keep up. The best scene is a long, quiet stretch in a corridor where nothing happens for what feels like a full minute, and the whole cinema stopped breathing.

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Sony will make another one, obviously, and I hope Cregger stays involved, because this is the first time the series has felt like it belongs to a filmmaker. Did you see it, and where does it sit for you next to Weapons and Barbarian?