Resident Evil's record is 13% from China. The last one was 51%

China has supplied 12.7% of Resident Evil's record. It supplied 51.1% of the record it broke.

Zach Cregger's film reached $320.2m worldwide on Sunday, its fourth weekend, Deadline reported, which makes it the highest-grossing film in a franchise that has been going since 2002. The title it took belonged to Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, on $312.2m. Most of the coverage, Screen Rant's included, has put the two totals side by side and stopped there.

Side by side they look like the same film. They are $8m apart, a gap of 2.6%. Take them apart by territory and they have almost nothing in common.

Where the two records came from

Box Office Mojo's breakdown of The Final Chapter has $159.5m of its $312.2m coming from China, where it opened on 24 February 2017 to $94.3m, at the time the biggest Friday-to-Sunday start for an imported film, according to The Hollywood Reporter. That is $159.5m divided by $312.2m, or 51.1%. North America gave it $26.8m. That is 8.6%.

Cregger's film only reached China on Monday 5 October, in the back half of the Golden Week holiday. Its first seven days there came to $40.6m on Deadline's count, and $40.7m on Patrick Frater's, who covers Asian box office and cites Artisan Gateway. Use the lower one: $40.6m of $320.2m is 12.7%. North America has given it $138.5m, per Box Office Mojo. That is 43.3%.

So the useful comparison removes China from both. The Final Chapter made $152.7m everywhere else on earth ($312.2m less $159.5m). The new film has made $279.6m ($320.2m less $40.6m). Outside China, this record is 83% bigger than the last one.

The American figure is starker still. At $138.5m, Cregger's film has taken more in the US and Canada than Afterlife ($60.1m), Retribution ($42.3m) and The Final Chapter ($26.8m) put together. Those three add up to $129.2m. It has made 5.2 times what the last Paul W.S. Anderson film made at home.

Why the mix is worth more than the total

A dollar of gross is not a dollar to the studio, and the rate depends on where the ticket was sold. The usual rules of thumb give a distributor about half of the box office in North America and about 40% in most other countries. In China, a film imported on revenue-sharing terms returns 25%, a figure set by a 2012 trade agreement and laid out by the accountancy firm GHJ.

Run both films through those three rates. They are rules of thumb, and the real contracts will differ, so treat the result as a sketch.

• The Final Chapter: $13.4m from North America, $39.9m from China and $50.4m from the remaining $125.9m. About $103.7m.
• Resident Evil (2026): $69.3m from North America, $10.2m from China and $56.4m from the remaining $141.1m. About $135.9m.

On that sketch a record that is 2.6% bigger at the tills is worth 31% more to the people who made it. Sony is calling this a franchise best. It is underselling it.

There is a catch, and it is the budget. Cregger's film cost $75m before marketing, a figure Variety reported in September and The Numbers carries. The same table has The Final Chapter at $40m. Divide the sketched returns by the cost and the 2017 film brought back about $2.59 for every production dollar, against $1.81 so far for the new one. The old record was cheaper to set. It was also set by a film American audiences had stopped going to see.

The trackers disagree on that old record. Box Office Mojo has The Final Chapter at $312.2m and The Numbers has it at $314.1m. The new film is past both.

What China still has to give

The $40.6m week needs context from the other direction too. It is less than half of what The Final Chapter took in China in its first three days. Variety, citing Artisan Gateway, put the new film's first proper weekend, 9 to 11 October, at RMB81.2m, or $12.1m. That was enough for first place. Frater reports that the ticketing service Maoyan is forecasting a final Chinese total of $79m.

If Maoyan is right, China ends up at almost exactly half of the $159.5m it gave the franchise nine years ago, and adds another $38.4m to the running total. That alone would lift the film to $358.6m before any other country sells another ticket.

Japan is the other late arrival. Capcom's home market opened on 9 October to $3.6m, Deadline and Frater both report. The Final Chapter opened there to $5.28m two days before Christmas 2016 and ran to $36.5m, so the new film has started at 68% of its predecessor's pace in the one country where the games come from. Worth watching.

For anyone who read us on opening weekend, a correction is owed. We wrote on the Saturday that the film was heading for about $50m and looked front-loaded. It finished the three days on $60.2m, and it has since made 2.3 times that at home. The front-loading was real. The ceiling we put on it was not.

It is also now Cregger's biggest film, past the $270m of Weapons, and the one clear win in a Sony autumn that has just delivered a $5.5m opening for The Social Reckoning.

The next test is the weekend of 16 to 18 October, the film's second in both China and Japan. A normal hold in either puts $350m in reach by the end of the month.