The Resident Evil Rotten Tomatoes record has been comprehensively rewritten: Zach Cregger’s adaptation, the Barbarian and Weapons director’s take on the survival horror series, has landed a 97% critics’ score based on 91 reviews ahead of its cinema release on 18 September, making it the highest-rated video game film ever on the platform.
The score comfortably clears the previous record holder, 2024’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which sat at 86%. It also towers over every earlier entry in the Resident Evil franchise itself, none of which has come close to charting in respectable territory with critics.
A franchise history of critical disappointment
The contrast with what came before is stark. The Milla Jovovich-starring Resident Evil from 2002 holds a 36% rating on the review aggregator, while Resident Evil: Apocalypse, which followed in 2004, sits at a lowly 18%. Extinction, Afterlife and Retribution all land in the 20s. The 2021 reboot Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, starring Kaya Scodelario, managed a 30%.
According to the Rotten Tomatoes editorial, the critics’ high-water mark for the franchise before this weekend was Resident Evil: The Final Chapter in 2017, which reached just 37%. That is now the second-best critical score in franchise history, sitting some 60 points beneath Cregger’s film.
The audience picture across the series tells a slightly different story. As Deadline notes, the best audience score previously belonged to the original 2002 film, which earned 67% from general viewers, a reminder that the franchise has always had a devoted fanbase even when critics walked away unimpressed.
What critics are saying about the new Resident Evil
Cregger’s film follows Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, a medical courier tasked with delivering a mysterious package to Raccoon City General Hospital who finds himself fighting for survival when the undead begin appearing. The film is set in the same universe as the games but tells an original story rather than adapting any single entry directly.
The critical reception has been enthusiastic across the board. Digital Spy called it ‘one of the most purely entertaining horror movies of the year’, adding that calling it the best live-action film of the series would be damning with faint praise. The Seattle Times praised its 90-minute running time and described it as ‘scary, clever, and feels like it could be an RE game but doesn’t just do a shot-for-shot remake’. Empire singled out Abrams’s performance, writing that ‘in him, Cregger has found the bumbling, chaotic De Niro to his Scorsese’.
The Independent noted that the film ‘feels thoroughly like a film by Zach Cregger’, praising his ability to deliver jump scares ‘with this much elegant panache’. The Times offered perhaps the most unexpected take, describing it at its core as ‘a sweet and hyperkinetic children’s cartoon that is wrapped up in a frantic, violent and gory zombie flick’. Little White Lies was more measured, calling it ‘a massively impressive and effective film’ while acknowledging that the low bar set by its predecessors may be doing some of the heavy lifting.
Sony Pictures is behind the production, which was made for $75 million, according to Cinema Occupy. That is a relatively restrained budget for a major studio horror release, and if the critical momentum translates into box office returns, it could set up the Resident Evil Rotten Tomatoes record as the launchpad for a very different kind of franchise chapter than the one audiences have been used to.
Resident Evil opens in cinemas on 18 September.
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