Sony walked into the weekend expecting $40 million from Resident Evil. By Friday night, that number looked conservative.

Zach Cregger's reboot of the video game franchise grossed $26.3 million on its first day, including $8.8 million from Thursday previews, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The studio is now projecting a three-day opening in the $53 million to $55 million range, with some estimates pushing closer to $60 million. Either way, it's the biggest launch Resident Evil has ever had.

That's a franchise that's been around since 2002, when Paul W.S. Anderson's original film kicked off a run of six Milla Jovovich movies that together grossed north of $1.2 billion worldwide. The last attempt at a reboot, 2021's Welcome to Raccoon City, came and went without much fuss. This one isn't doing that.

A horror hit that critics actually like

What sets this version apart isn't just the money. Resident Evil is sitting at a 96 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the highest score any film in the series has managed, paired with a 92 percent audience score and a B+ CinemaScore. THR's own critic Frank Scheck called it a film that showcases Cregger's "cinematic chops and perverse sense of humor," landing somewhere between terrifying and funny at once.

For Cregger, this is the new high point of what's been a very good run. His last film, Weapons, opened to $43.5 million for Warner Bros. In August 2025 and picked up an Oscar. Resident Evil beats that easily, and it does it on a $75 million budget spread across 3,684 North American theatres, with Austin Abrams playing a medical courier trying to get a package out of a Raccoon City outbreak, alongside Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser.

The rest of the weekend chart looks a lot less dramatic in comparison. Practical Magic 2, the Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman sequel from Warner Bros., is heading for around $10.4 million in its second frame, a steep drop of about 65 percent, though its $48.2 million domestic total has already topped what the 1998 original made in North America.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, fresh off becoming the highest-grossing film of all time domestically, slides to third with $6.3 million in its eighth week, pushing its total toward $944.3 million. Whether it becomes the first movie to cross the billion mark at home is still an open question. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey rounds out the top four with roughly $5 million in its tenth weekend, sitting at $609.8 million and holding the title of Universal's biggest release ever. Coyote vs. Acme closes out the top five with an estimated $4.2 million, its total run at $54.5 million after Ketchup Entertainment rescued it from the scrap heap.

Monday's actuals will confirm exactly where Resident Evil lands, but Sony already has the number it wanted going into the weekend, and then some.