Resident Evil's Thursday previews beat the last reboot's whole weekend

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City took $5.32m in its entire opening weekend in November 2021. Zach Cregger's Resident Evil took between $8m and $9m on Thursday, before a single Friday ticket had been sold.

That is 50% to 69% more in one afternoon and evening than the last reboot managed in three days. The estimate was reported by Deadline this morning and repeated by Dork. The franchise's previous preview record was about $1m, set by Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. This one is eight or nine times that.

The tracking says $40m to $50m for the weekend. The film's own comparisons say more.

What the preview multiples say

The cleanest guide to a weekend is how many times its Thursday a similar film went on to make. Two comparisons fit this one closely.

Cregger's last film, Weapons, took $5.75m in previews and opened to $43.5m. That is a multiple of 7.57. Mortal Kombat II, which holds the opening record for an R-rated video game adaptation, took $5.2m on its Thursday in May and finished the weekend on $38.5m, per DraftKings Network's box office report. That is 7.40.

Apply the lower multiple to the lower preview figure and Resident Evil opens to $59.2m. Apply the higher one to the higher figure and it is $68.1m. Tracking at $40m to $50m implies a multiple of between 4.4 and 6.25, which would make this the most front-loaded of the three by a distance.

It might be. There are two honest reasons to discount my arithmetic.

The first is the clock. Previews began at 2pm on Thursday, according to both Deadline and Dork, which is an early start and inflates the Thursday figure. The second is the audience. Box Office Theory expects the film to skew towards men, gamers and under-35s, the people most likely to turn up on the first possible night and least likely to be left over for Saturday. Weapons was an original film with no fan base to exhaust. This is a 30-year-old Capcom brand.

Even so, a multiple of 4.4 would be unusually poor for a film with the reviews this one has. It sits at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes from 134 critics, with a 91% audience score. Word of mouth should add to the weekend, not drain it. My view: $50m is a floor rather than a ceiling, and anything under it would say more about the 2pm start than about the film.

Three days against seven films

The more striking comparison is with the franchise itself. The six Milla Jovovich films, plus the 2021 reboot, took $288.2m at the US box office between them, according to The Numbers. That is an average of $41.2m a film, for a whole run.

If Cregger's film opens to $45m, it will have out-grossed the lifetime US totals of four of those seven films in a weekend: the 2002 original ($40.1m), Retribution ($42.3m), The Final Chapter ($26.8m) and Welcome to Raccoon City ($17m). Above about $51m it passes Apocalypse and Extinction too. The Numbers and Wikipedia's series table differ slightly on Apocalypse, at $50.7m and $51.2m, so take the higher one.

The last reboot is the more useful warning. Welcome to Raccoon City cost $25m, took about $17m in the US and $41.9m worldwide, and ended the series for five years. Sony and Constantin have now tried again at three times the price, and handed it to a director coming off one of the biggest original horror hits of the decade. The previews suggest that was the right bet.

That leaves Afterlife. Its $60.1m US total from 2010 is the franchise's best, and its $26.65m opening weekend is the record this film is on course to break by Saturday.

A foreign franchise comes home

The old films were never really American hits. They were worldwide ones that happened to be made in English. The seven films took about $1.28bn globally, and less than a quarter of it (22.5%) came from the US. The Final Chapter is the extreme case: $314.1m worldwide, of which $26.8m, or 8.5%, was American.

This weekend runs the other way. Deadline's global forecast puts the worldwide opening at about $80m, and Kris Avalon's preview splits that as $40m to $50m at home and about $31m overseas. On those numbers, between 56% and 62% of the opening comes from the US.

Part of that is timing. Japan does not get the film until 9 October. Still, a franchise that Sony once sold to the world is now being sold to Americans first. That is a Cregger effect. Weapons made more than $150m in the US.

The money

The budget is reported at $75m by Wikipedia and Kris Avalon and at $80m by The Numbers. Either way, it is the most anyone has spent on a Resident Evil film. The most expensive of the Anderson run was Retribution, at $65m. A $50m opening covers two-thirds of the lower figure before any overseas money arrives. For comparison, Ridley Scott's The Dog Stars opened to $8m on a $70m budget last weekend.

There is also a scheduling habit here. Apocalypse, Extinction, Afterlife and Retribution all opened in September. So does this. The series found its month 22 years ago, and this time it arrives after a record summer rather than in the gap one leaves.

Friday's figure, including the previews, will be reported on Saturday morning. If it comes in above $25m, the $40m to $50m tracking will look very cautious indeed. Sony reports its weekend estimate on Sunday.