In 1996, fewer than two million American homes had a PlayStation, and the kids in them thought Resident Evil belonged to us. Then roughly 38 million Americans bought tickets to watch Milla Jovovich play a woman Capcom never created. On Friday, Zach Cregger, who says he has never seen a single one of those movies, finally makes a Resident Evil movie for the kids who played the game. I was one of those kids. We were the minority the whole time.
The most important person in the history of Resident Evil is Milla Jovovich, and she has never been in a Resident Evil game.
I know. Shinji Mikami made Resident Evil. Capcom has sold 213 million copies of it as of June 30, 2026, which makes it the company’s biggest franchise by 82 million units over Monster Hunter, a series about hitting very large lizards with a very large hammer. Alice, meanwhile, has never appeared in one of those 213 million copies, not once in twenty-four years. If you’d said that first sentence to me in 1996 I’d have thrown a controller at you, and I could have reached, because the Sony controller came with a six-foot cord.
But I’ve done the arithmetic, and the arithmetic doesn’t care what I threw. Capcom’s own records say the original PlayStation Resident Evil sold 2.75 million copies, worldwide, ever. Paul W.S. Anderson’s six movies with Jovovich grossed about $271 million in the United States. Divide each film’s domestic gross by the average ticket price of the year it opened ($5.80 in 2002, $8.97 by 2017) and you get roughly 38 million American admissions, before you count the rest of the planet, which is where most of the money came from. That’s about fourteen American movie tickets for every copy of the game sold anywhere on Earth.
You’re about to say that a ticket isn’t a person, and that a rented game gets played by three kids on one couch. Fine. Count the two Director’s Cut editions too (another 2.33 million), assume every copy of the game was played by three people, and cut my ticket number in half for repeat viewers and 3D surcharges. The movies still win, about 19 million to 15 million. Narrowly. But a win is a win. Ask anyone who ever finished this game with the knife.
And I’m not the one saying it. Capcom is. In a 2013 feature on its own investor-relations site, a Capcom USA director recalled that when the Biohazard 5 team pitched Hollywood studios on a CG movie, they were flatly refused, until they said the English name. Then the studios changed their tune completely: “we know it from the movie, please let us make it.” (The same page says the studios’ attitude changed by 360 degrees, which is a translation error and also the most accurate sentence anyone has ever written about this franchise.) That’s a video game company telling its shareholders that the reason anybody in Los Angeles knew its video game was the movie.
This Friday, Sony opens Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil in about 3,500 theaters. Cregger has said of the Anderson films, happily, that he has “never seen a single one.” Nearly everyone covering the movie treats this as a correction, the grown-up finally taking the franchise back from the people who ruined it. So let me put my opinion where you can see it. The Alice movies were Resident Evil. Not a version of it and not a betrayal of it. For fifteen years, for most of the people who had ever heard the words, they were the thing itself. The fans who spent those fifteen years complaining (I was one, and I was loud) were a rounding error who believed we were the owners. Cregger’s movie is the first Resident Evil movie ever made for the rounding error. I’ll be there Friday. I just know what we are now.
I was the item box
In the spring of 1996 I was nineteen, a sophomore at a state university two hours from the town of about 11,000 people in central Ohio where I grew up, and I was home for the weekend with no money, which is the natural state of a college sophomore. My parents’ house had bought a Super Nintendo in 1992 and considered the question of video games closed. I did not own a PlayStation, which put me in the national majority by a lot. That December, Next Generation counted 1.7 million PlayStations sold in the entire United States. My friend Kyle had one. Kyle had lived three streets over since the fourth grade, had skipped college, and was still living in his parents’ basement, which had a 27-inch television in it. He’d paid the full $299 for the PlayStation out of his own paychecks, only to watch Sony cut the price to $199 that May by springing the announcement at an E3 roundtable where every company had agreed to make no surprise announcements. Nintendo and Sega called it cheating. Kyle took it personally for the rest of the decade.
The game cost $59.99 at Electronics Boutique, in a tall long box with a black PlayStation stripe down the side and an ESRB “M” in the corner. The nearest Electronics Boutique was in a mall 35 minutes away, Kyle had spent everything he had on the console, and I had a meal plan. So we rented it from the Blockbuster out by the highway. Blockbuster rented PlayStation games in 1996, and that summer it was giving away 3,500 years of free game rentals in a sweepstakes. We didn’t win one. We had it from Friday until Monday.
Kyle held the controller. I held the notebook. It was the spiral notebook from my Western Civ class, college-ruled in the most literal sense, and by Sunday it was the most important document in his basement, which is more than anybody ever said about my Western Civ notes. We didn’t own Capcom’s official strategy guide, which welcomed you, in capital letters, to the world of survival horror. So I drew the map myself. I wrote down which crest went in which door, where the shotgun was, what we’d left in the item box, and in the margin, a running count of ink ribbons, because you could only save the game at a typewriter, and every save cost you a ribbon, and ribbons ran out. The game was a horror movie. The notebook was an accounting ledger. I think I understood, even then, which one I was better at.
The first argument was over who to play. Kyle wanted Chris. I made a case for Jill that involved eight inventory slots versus Chris’s six, plus the fact (later confirmed by the same guide) that Jill finds more ink ribbons. I won. It’s the last argument about Resident Evil I have ever won.
Here’s what nobody who played it later understands about 1996. The controls weren’t retro. They were just the controls. We didn’t call them “tank controls.” Nobody did. The phrase is nowhere in the stack of 1996 and 1997 magazines I went through, and by the time PC Gamer ran a eulogy for tank controls in 2015, they’d been dead for years. It’s a word invented by people looking back. We said “the controls,” and we said it with hate. And every time Jill went through a door, the screen went black and a door creaked open, slowly, in the dark, for about as long as it takes to hold your breath. Next Generation sneered that summer at the stupid ‘door-opening’ animation, which everyone knew was there to hide the load time. They were right about the load time and wrong about everything else. The door was the scariest thing in the game, because the door was the only time the game admitted that it didn’t know what was on the other side either.
When the first zombie turned around, eating something in that hallway, Kyle made a noise I have never heard a human make since. The following fall, EGM would ask its readers who could possibly forget the first time a bloody-mouthed zombie turned around. Kyle couldn’t. I wrote “ZOMBIE (HALLWAY)” in block capitals in the notebook, as if we’d need the reminder.
We said “Jill sandwich” to each other roughly four hundred times that weekend. That was Barry’s line after a ceiling nearly flattened her, and it’s in the same voice track where he calls her “the master of unlocking.” Next Generation‘s review that May quoted the lockpick line, called the voice acting laughable, and then concluded that it was one game nobody should be without. That was the correct review. Nobody has improved on it.
At about two in the morning on Saturday we got stuck, and we did the thing that you could only do in 1996. Capcom ran a hint line, 1-900-680-2583: 79 cents a minute for recorded tips, 99 cents a minute for a live “game counselor,” though the counselors only worked 8:30 to 5 Pacific on weekdays. You had to be 18 or have a parent’s permission. For once in our lives, we were old enough. We called. Eight minutes, $6.32, and the recorded tips were about a different part of the game. The charge turned up on his parents’ phone bill in May as a 900 number, and his parents had a nineteen-year-old son living in their basement, and in 1996 that looked exactly like what you’re picturing.
On Monday the disc went back. We’d made it to the Guardhouse. Our save, Jill standing next to a typewriter with three ink ribbons left, stayed on Kyle’s gray memory card, which had cost $24.99, exactly as much as the controller. That Christmas Kyle bought himself a Nintendo 64, and the PlayStation went into a closet with Jill still in it.
The next summer, home from school, I got a job at that same Blockbuster, rewinding other people’s tapes. That fall Capcom put out the Director’s Cut for $39, with a Resident Evil 2 demo in the box, because it had stopped pressing the original that March. The federal minimum wage had gone up to $5.15 on September 1, so the game cost me about seven and a half hours. The ads promised the uncensored version. It shipped censored anyway, and Capcom blamed a localization error.
At the end of that summer, Kyle let me take his PlayStation out of the closet and back to school. He offered me the memory card too. I didn’t take it. I spent another $24.99, almost five more hours, on a card of my own, because I didn’t want to overwrite us. I finished Resident Evil that October, alone, in an off-campus apartment, on a 13-inch television, with a new notebook I didn’t need to share with anyone. I gave the PlayStation back at Thanksgiving.
What I understand now, and didn’t then, is that there were two Resident Evils in that house over that weekend. Mine was the notebook: the slots, the ribbons, the map, the thing you manage. Kyle’s was a zombie turning around. Mine was the one Capcom designed. His was the one everybody would pay for.
Raccoon City has never been in America
I need to talk about something else for a minute, and it’s going to seem unrelated.
Raccoon City is supposed to be a small American town, the kind of place with a police department in an old art museum and a pharmaceutical company that owns everything. It has never been in America. It was drawn in Osaka. The English dialogue I’d memorized was recorded in a Tokyo studio by Mikami’s own team, who went around Capcom’s usual localization process because, as Capcom’s former localization lead told Time Extension this year, Mikami wanted that very Western horror-film kind of atmosphere. The live-action intro was shot in Japan with actors credited by first names only. American kids saw it in black and white, with the gore cut; the Japanese saw it in color, with Chris lighting a cigarette. The Resident Evil I thought of as mine was an American B-movie, as imagined by people who had watched a lot of them, and then dubbed back into English.
Then it kept not being in America. The film rights have belonged to Constantin Film, a German company, since the late 1990s. The first movie was shot in Berlin, partly in an unfinished subway station. Extinction shot in the desert near Mexicali, where the temperature hit 128 degrees. Afterlife shot in Toronto and, according to Ontario’s film agency, became the most successful Canadian feature film ever made, passing Porky’s. The Final Chapter shot in Cape Town. The 2021 reboot shot in Sudbury, Ontario. Cregger’s version shot in Prague and a 19th-century railway tunnel in Litoměřice, with about $9.1 million in Czech incentives. Raccoon City has been played by Japan, Germany, Mexico, Canada, South Africa, and the Czech Republic. It has never once been played by the United States.
Cregger, who was born in Arlington, Virginia, is the first American-born director of a live-action Resident Evil movie. (Anderson and Johannes Roberts, who made five of the seven between them, are English; the other two were born in Australia and Chile.) He was fifteen in the spring of 1996, four years younger than Kyle and me. He says he actually played the sequel first.
This is where the digression pays off. For twenty-four years, my generation of fans said the movies weren’t faithful. Faithful to what? The thing we loved was already a translation: a Japanese idea of an American zombie movie, voiced in Tokyo, reshot in black and white for us, and sold under an English name that Capcom USA’s own communications director voted against as “super-cheesy.” The Jill sandwich was a translation. So was Alice. The only difference is that more people liked Alice.
The best comparison I have comes from the same year. In the summer of 1996, the biggest song in America was “Macarena,” which spent fourteen weeks at number one. The version that did it wasn’t the one Los del Río recorded in Spain. It was the Bayside Boys Mix, reworked in Miami with English lyrics added over the original hook. Nobody at a wedding reception in 1996 stopped dancing to demand the Spanish original, and the handful who knew it existed were correct and alone. And here’s where it goes one step further than it should: the remix is the only reason anyone outside Spain knows who Los del Río are. The unfaithful version didn’t steal the song. It carried it. That’s Capcom’s 2013 investor page, set to a dance.
The faithful version would have killed it
By 1997 everybody knew a movie was coming. In the very first issue of the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, a kid from Minnesota wrote in to say that Resident Evil was one of the main reasons he’d bought a PlayStation, “now with the movie being made.”
The man first hired to make it was George A. Romero. Capcom had him shoot a 30-second live-action commercial for Resident Evil 2 that ran only in Japan, with Brad Renfro as Leon, and then he wrote a screenplay that was, by every account, faithful: Jill, Chris, the mansion, plus mutant sharks, giant snakes, and a man-eating plant. It never got made. In Variety’s 2016 retelling, the explanation from Capcom producer Yoshiki Okamoto was blunt: “Romero’s script wasn’t good, so Romero was fired.”
So here’s a hypothetical, and I want to run it all the way out.
Suppose Constantin says yes. It’s October 1999. Romero’s Resident Evil opens, R-rated, with Jill and Chris and Barry and the plant and the shark. I’m twenty-three, I see it opening night, and I love it more than I have ever loved anything that wasn’t a person.
Now look at what zombie movies did in American theaters in the 1990s. Tom Savini’s Night of the Living Dead remake made $5.8 million in 1990. The only zombie movie in American theaters in 1996, the year of the game, was the Italian Cemetery Man, which made $253,986. In 1999, a faithful, gory Romero movie from a video game has a ceiling, and even if Romero is at his best, it’s a $20 million hit, a cult classic that plays at midnight for twenty years and never gets a sequel.
So there’s no Anderson and no Alice. Jovovich and Anderson never meet on the set, and their daughter never plays the villain. Afterlife never passes Porky’s. Nobody in China buys a ticket. The phrase “Resident Evil” means, to a movie studio, a pretty good zombie movie from 1999 that the guy at the video store keeps recommending.
And then, a decade later, Capcom’s Biohazard 5 staff walks into a Hollywood studio to pitch a CG movie, and the studio says no, and this time it doesn’t change its mind, because nobody there knows it from the movie.
I would have gotten my movie. Resident Evil would have gotten smaller. The faithful version is the one that would have killed it. The unfaithful one is the reason there’s anything left for Cregger to be faithful to on Friday.
Alice cost $5.80
In October 2000, Variety reported that Paul Anderson, the Mortal Kombat guy, would write and direct a Resident Evil movie for Constantin, for about $40 million, in time for Halloween 2001. He missed Halloween. His lead was Milla Jovovich, who had played the game a lot with her little brother, wanted to produce the movie, and was then asked to audition. Her reaction, as she told it to GQ: “You really going to ask me to read for this?” She read for it. She married the director. Anderson, for the record, says that adapting a game without playing it is outrageous, and he makes his production designers watch Let’s Plays.
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Milla Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson at WonderCon 2012, six months before Retribution opened at number one. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Resident Evil opened on March 15, 2002, and came in second: $17.7 million from 2,528 theaters, behind Ice Age, which made $46.3 million the same weekend. Resident Evil lost its first weekend as a movie to a sloth. The soundtrack CD had come out three days earlier and was a perfect snapshot of 2002 in a jewel case: Slipknot, Static-X, Mudvayne, Adema, Saliva, Rammstein, and four score cues by Marilyn Manson. The DVD came out that July with a $26.98 list price.
I want to price this out, because the price is the argument. To play Resident Evil in the spring of 1996, you needed a $299 PlayStation, a $59.99 game, and a $24.99 memory card, plus 79 cents a minute if you got stuck at 2 a.m. That’s about $385 before the phone bill. To see Alice, you needed $5.80. Alice didn’t beat Jill because she was better. She beat Jill because she cost about 1.5 percent as much, and she came with a Slipknot remix.
I was twenty-five, out of school, and living two hours away. Kyle had stayed in town. I drove home that weekend, and he called my parents’ house and asked if I wanted to see it. We went opening weekend, to the eight-screen out by the highway. He loved it. I spent the drive home listing everything it got wrong. No Jill, no Chris, no Barry, no typewriters, and a laser hallway that was never in any game. The Red Queen wasn’t in any game either. Kyle let me go on for a while. Then he said, “It’s a zombie movie with Milla Jovovich. What did you want?”
I said, “Jill.”
He said, “Who’s Jill?”
He had played as her for an entire weekend. He had held the controller while she played the piano. (Capcom’s own guide said Jill at the piano was a Tori Amos wanna-be, which, in 1996, the year Boys for Pele came out, was a compliment.) Six years later he did not know her name. I’ve never been more right about anything, and it has never mattered less.
Everyone in these movies is a guest star
The Alice movies are full of famous people, and every one of them falls into one of four types.
The Person From the Show Your Roommate Watched. Wentworth Miller played Chris Redfield in Afterlife in 2010, the year after Prison Break ended. Ali Larter, from Heroes, played Claire Redfield in three of them. Iain Glen played the evil Dr. Isaacs twice before Game of Thrones made him Ser Jorah, and once after. When Netflix tried a series in 2022 it cast Lance Reddick as Wesker, and then canceled it after one season.
The Person Who Dies to Show You the Stakes. Michelle Rodriguez, nine months after The Fast and the Furious, plays Rain in the first one, and she dies. Then she comes back as a clone, twice, in Retribution, because nobody in this series is allowed to stay dead, including the idea of death. Colin Salmon walks into a hallway full of lasers and comes out as cubes.
The Game Character Played by an Actor Nobody Asked For. Sienna Guillory as Jill in Apocalypse, in the tube top from Resident Evil 3. Kevin Durand as Barry. Johann Urb as Leon. Li Bingbing as Ada Wong. Shawn Roberts as Wesker, three times. Then the 2021 reboot cast its own set: Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Avan Jogia, Tom Hopper, as Claire, Jill, Chris, Leon, and Wesker.
The Family. The villain of The Final Chapter, the Red Queen, was played by Ever Anderson, age 8, the director’s daughter with the star. This is either the most or least Resident Evil thing that has ever happened.
Look at the first and third types again. Chris Redfield, the hero of the first game and the hero of Resident Evil 5, is a guest star in these movies. So are Jill and Leon and Wesker. Every famous person in the Anderson series, including the Capcom characters, is a supporting player in a story about a woman who isn’t in any Capcom game. That wasn’t a mistake the fans put up with. It was the product. When Inside Pulse’s Brendan Campbell reviewed The Final Chapter on Blu-ray in 2017, he called it smart of the series to create an entirely new protagonist instead of borrowing one of the game characters. He was right, and I was still carrying my notebook.
The audience never left. Worldwide grosses went up almost every time, from $103 million for the first to $312 million for the last. The audiences who paid gave them B, B, B-, B-, C+, and B on CinemaScore, which means that people who bought tickets got basically what they paid for. On one September weekend in 2012, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Retribution took number one at the box office on the same weekend Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master set an arthouse record, and I think about that roughly once a month. The Final Chapter made about $33 million on its first day in China, more than it made in its entire American run.
I want to stop being cute for a paragraph. These movies look weightless, and they weren’t weightless to make. During the Cape Town shoot for The Final Chapter in December 2015, a crew member named Ricardo Cornelius was crushed and killed when a Humvee slid off a rotating platform. Olivia Jackson, the stunt performer doubling Jovovich, hit a camera crane head-on during a motorcycle stunt, spent 17 days in a coma, and lost her left arm. In 2020 a South African court ruled the stunt had been negligently planned and executed. The whole series runs on the idea that nobody stays hurt. That idea had a price, and other people paid it.
We finally got our movie, and we stayed home
Here’s a question, and I want you to answer it honestly. If you could erase all six Alice movies and replace them with one perfect, faithful Resident Evil, one only you and the other 2.75 million people who bought the game would ever see, would you?
I’d say yes. I’d be lying, and there’s proof.
In 2021, Sony made the movie I’d described to Kyle in a parking lot. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City had Jill, Chris, Claire, Leon, and Wesker, the Spencer mansion and the police station, set in 1998. It even restaged the first zombie turning around. It opened the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and made $5.3 million over five days, the lowest opening in franchise history, and $41.9 million worldwide. Audiences gave it a C+, tied for the worst grade in the series. We had been asking for this for nineteen years. When it showed up, we stayed home.
Here’s the part that doesn’t fit, and I’m leaving it in. Since 2017 the games have taken Resident Evil back, completely. The 2019 remake of Resident Evil 2 alone has sold 19.7 million copies, more than seven times the original game. Resident Evil Requiem came out in February and has already sold 8 million. By 2026 the people who play Resident Evil are the majority, finally, and the movie is being made for them. But they’re not me. They played a 2019 remake with the camera over Leon’s shoulder, and Cregger’s touchstone is Resident Evil 4, whose healing items he says he mimicked exactly. The minority won. I’m still in a smaller one. I don’t have a theory about that. I just think it’s worth noticing.
The movie for the rounding error
Everybody knows that Weapons got Cregger this job. Everybody’s wrong. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news of a four-studio bidding war in January 2025, and Sony had won it by March. Weapons didn’t open until August 8, 2025. It went on to make $270 million worldwide, and in March, Amy Madigan won an Oscar for it. Cregger got Resident Evil on the strength of Barbarian and a pitch. Producer Roy Lee told Collider that Cregger went from a $4 million movie to a $38 million movie to an $80 million one. The first Resident Evil movie cost $33 million.
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Zach Cregger at San Diego Comic-Con, July 23, 2026, the day the full Resident Evil trailer came out. Photo: Kevin Paul (WikiPortraits), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
It’s a strange movie to make for $80 million, which is the best thing about it. No Leon, no Jill, no Alice. The hero is Bryan, played by Austin Abrams from Weapons, a medical courier who drives into Raccoon City on the night of Resident Evil 2 to deliver an organ to Raccoon City General and scrounges for ammo once everything goes wrong. Paul Walter Hauser, Zach Cherry from Severance, and Kali Reis from True Detective: Night Country are in it, and Reis’s ex-military character was originally written for a man. It runs about 90 minutes. It plays as a gala at Fantastic Fest the night before it opens (it is not the opening-night film, whatever you’ve read), and in IMAX that same Thursday. Test audiences said it was too funny, so the man from The Whitest Kids U’ Know cut the jokes. The only Resident Evil that was ever too funny was the one Mikami’s team recorded in Tokyo, and nobody cut those jokes.
Deadline has it tracking toward $35 million, maybe $50 million, and anything above $26.65 million beats Afterlife for the biggest opening in franchise history. It follows Practical Magic 2, which opened at number one last weekend with $30 million. The average ticket now runs about $12. In 1996 it was $4.42. The rounding error pays more now.
And the movie is about a guy carrying something. Bryan’s whole job is the thing I did in Kyle’s basement, and again, alone, the following fall. He has one item he can’t set down, he has a city full of things that want to eat him, and he has to decide, room by room, what’s worth the space. Cregger has made a movie out of the notebook. I don’t think anyone has ever made a movie for me before. I’m not sure it’s a good idea.
Kyle’s parents still live in the same house. As far as I know, our save is still on that gray memory card in a closet there, with Jill standing next to a typewriter in the Guardhouse and three ink ribbons left, waiting for a Monday that never came. Kyle doesn’t remember it’s there. I do. It’s why I bought my own card.
I texted Kyle last week. He still lives in town, four streets from where he grew up, and we talk about twice a year now, mostly about his two kids. The older one is nineteen, the age we were that weekend. I asked if he wanted to see Resident Evil on Friday. The dots went for a long time.
“is milla in it”
No, I wrote. This one’s for us.
“who’s us”
Fourteen to one, it turns out. I’m saving him a seat anyway.
