Resident Evil Is Now the Franchise's Highest-Grossing Film — a $40.6 Million China Opening Pushed It Past $320 Million Worldwide

A horror franchise that's spanned eight films and 25 years just got its biggest hit yet — and this one also happens to be its best-reviewed.

Resident Evil has become the highest-grossing film in its own franchise's 25-year history, crossing $320.2 million worldwide after its fourth weekend in release, according to Deadline and Screen Daily's box office reporting on October 12. The film pulled in $62.65 million globally over the weekend alone, enough to retake the number-one spot on the worldwide chart, and pushed its cumulative total past the $312.2 million earned by 2016's Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, the previous high point for the series across all eight films.

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The weekend's biggest single contributor was China, where Resident Evil opened to $40.6 million — described by Screen Daily as the best opening for a horror film in the territory in the past two years. That's a notable result for a genre that doesn't always travel well internationally, and especially in China, where horror releases are subject to additional content restrictions and don't always get a theatrical release at all.

North America, where the film opened a month earlier, has contributed $138.5 million of the worldwide total so far — meaning more than half of Resident Evil's total gross has now come from outside the US and Canada, a notable split for a reboot of an American studio franchise built on a Japanese video game series.

The record it just broke has stood for nearly a decade. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, the sixth film in the original Milla Jovovich-led series, closed out that franchise's run in January 2017 with $312.2 million worldwide, a total built heavily on international and Chinese box office at the time as well. This new film is a separate reboot, directed and co-written by Zach Cregger, with an entirely different cast and story, and it has now out-earned every film across both eras of the franchise.

The commercial record arrives alongside a genuinely strong critical one, which isn't always the same story for long-running horror franchises. This Resident Evil holds a 96% Tomatometer score and a 7.6 IMDb rating, the best-reviewed entry in the franchise by a wide margin, as FilmRated covered in its own look back at 2026's best-reviewed horror releases. A franchise reboot landing as both the highest-grossing and best-reviewed film in its own series at the same time is a genuinely uncommon combination — long-running horror franchises more often trade one for the other as they age.

For Cregger, the box office number extends a run that already included Barbarian and Weapons, both breakout horror hits built on critical goodwill translating into real audience turnout rather than franchise brand recognition alone. Resident Evil is his first time working inside an established studio franchise rather than an original premise, and the result suggests that combination — a filmmaker with a strong recent horror track record paired with a dormant but recognizable IP — worked for Sony and Constantin Film roughly as well as it could have.

Whether the result pushes Sony toward a fast-tracked sequel hasn't been addressed in the reporting on this weekend's numbers, and nothing about a follow-up has been confirmed as of this writing. What is confirmed is the number itself: eight films and 25 years into this franchise, the newest one is now also the biggest.

Original coverage: Resident Evil (2026) Becomes Its Franchise's Highest-Grossing Film