Zach Cregger's Resident Evil reboot opened to $60.1 million from 3,684 theaters and $108.3 million worldwide last weekend, per Deadline. That worldwide number is being billed as the biggest opening in the 24-year-old franchise's history.
Box office PR runs on one trick, and the trick is always the same one: pick your denominator. "Biggest opening in franchise history" sounds like a coronation until you look at the number it beat. That number is Resident Evil: Retribution, a 2012 Paul W.S. Anderson sequel that opened to about $71 million worldwide. Fourteen years old, and set at the very end of an era. The franchise record is a speed bump left over from a decade of sequels, and the Walking Franchise just cleared it, and Sony is already buying the trade ads.
The number that is actually worth saying out loud is the one the releases bury. In three days this reboot made more than the 2002 original made in its entire theatrical life, $102.9 million. The founding film, the one that started this whole grave, is now a lifetime gross that the newest corpse walks past in a single weekend. That is not a reboot. That is succession.
Strip the spin and the numbers are fine, which is the real joke. $8.8 million in Thursday previews, a B+ CinemaScore, a mid-90s Tomatometer, an audience that is 66 percent male and 75 percent under 35, a 93-minute movie about a medical courier in a city called Raccoon. No legacy cast. No China release date. No Milla Jovovich. The franchise is not back. It is solvent, and in Hollywood that is the same thing as back, except now the press release has to explain the difference, and the press release will not.
YOUR TURN: how many more sequels before "biggest opening in franchise history" stops being a record and starts being a diagnosis?
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to add your two cents. They are worth exactly that.