How Resident Evil: The Final Chapter Broke Box Office Records

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter broke some interesting box-office records. In an alternate universe, the first Resident Evil movie was written and directed by George A. Romero, who basically invented the modern-day zombie with Night Of The Living Dead. Romero’s script was somewhat faithful to the original game, but his screenplay was rejected and Paul W.S. Anderson was hired instead. Anderson’s initial idea was for the movie to act as a prequel to the game, revealing exactly how the virus outbreak happened in the Spencer Mansion.

Milla Jovovich as cast as an original character named Alice, who works for the Umbrella Corporation and has to escape an underground lab before she’s trapped forever with zombies and other creatures. The first Resident Evil movie was a decent success, but the franchise’s popularity – and profitability – wound up increasing with each passing sequel. Neither fans nor critics were impressed with the movies – especially with their huge deviations from the source material – but Jovovich’s charisma and their focus on outlandish action made them popular with moviegoers.

The Resident Evil movies were produced for relatively modest budgets in terms of action blockbusters, with the most expensive entry being 2012’s Resident Evil: Retribution at $65 million. Ironically, the somewhat disappointing performance of that instalment at the box-office led to Resident Evil: The Final Chapter being produced for a more conservative $40 million instead. The movie still ended up being the most successful of the franchise, grossing $312 million worldwide – but that’s where its numbers get really interesting.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter’s box-office tally brought the six-movie franchise to $1.2 billion collectively, officially making it the most successful franchise based on a video game by some margin. It turns out the movie was a bomb in North America, taking in less than $27 million. That means the sequel earned a whopping 91% of its grosses overseas, with nearly $160 million of that coming from China. The movie debuted to a huge box-office weekend there that saw it raking in $94 million according to Deadline, a record-breaking number for an English language import.

So not only was Resident Evil: The Final Chapter the biggest hit of the series, but nearly all of that haul came from overseas audiences, which set a new record itself. In fact, taking away its domestic gross wouldn’t even have much of an impact on its final numbers. It will be interesting to see how the planned movie reboot – which is said to focus more on the horror roots of the games – will fare when it arrives.

About The Author

Padraig Cotter
(3500 Articles Published)

It’s pronounced Paw-rick, not Pad-raig. Now that’s out of the way, a brief introduction. Padraig has been writing about film online since 2012, when a friend asked if he’d like to contribute the occasional review or feature to their site.

A part-time hobby soon blossomed into a career when he discovered he really loved writing about movies, TV and video games – he even (arguably) had a little bit of talent for it. He has written words for Den of Geek, Collider, The Irish Times and Screen Rant over the years, and can discuss anything from the MCU – where Hawkeye is clearly the best character – to the most obscure cult b-movie gem, and his hot takes often require heat resistant gloves to handle.

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He’s super modern too, so his favorite movies include Jaws, Die Hard, The Thing, Ghostbusters and Batman. He can be found as i_Padds on Twitter making bad puns.

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