Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil has been out for less than a week, and the movie already looks like another pretty spectacular win for the Weapons filmmaker and fans of new horror movies. For the most part, Critics dug Cregger's latest film, audiences showed up, and the video game movie adaptation just gave the long-running franchise its biggest opening weekend ever. So you would never guess from watching it that his film holds one wild stat that is completely blowing my mind.
Cregger revealed during an appearance on The Big Picture podcast that Resident Evil was only completely finished “maybe” two weeks before it hit the 2026 movie schedule. As he put it:
We finished the movie like a week and a half ago, maybe. Maybe I’m being a little… maybe it was two weeks ago. It was pencils down at 11:59, Saturday night because the DCP had to ship.
That is already wild, but the story gets even crazier because some international audiences technically saw a slightly different version of the movie. He continued:
The international version is different than the domestic version, because I was still needing to make changes. We missed our international finish line time, you know, so there are shots that I’m not stoked on in the international version, that are like better in the domestic. That’s how down-to-the-wire it was.
Cregger made Weapons and Resident Evil practically back-to-back, and that schedule apparently followed him into post-production. Missing the window to incorporate some of his final tweaks overseas must be frustrating, but I have to admit, as a domestic audience member, I’m happy we got the one he’s happiest with.
Still, two weeks? Most of us get nervous submitting something inconsequential two minutes before a deadline. It's wild to think about the Barbarian filmmaker finishing a $75 million studio horror movie while theaters were presumably already warming up the popcorn machines and setting out the grotesquely-themed popcorn buckets.
It also puts the production into perspective. Cregger released Weapons in August 2025, then had another major horror movie in theaters a little over a year later. That is a ridiculous turnaround for two effects-heavy studio productions, especially when Resident Evil spends much of its lean 90-minute runtime throwing Austin Abrams through increasingly elaborate Raccoon City nightmares.
Whatever chaos was happening behind the scenes doesn't seem to have scared audiences away. The flick opened to roughly $60 million domestically and another 48.3 million internationally, for a $108.3 million worldwide debut. That is the biggest opening weekend in the RE movie franchise’s history. It also earned a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score around opening weekend and a B+ CinemaScore from audiences. That makes the two-week stat even harder for me to wrap my head around.
There is something wonderfully appropriate about a Resident Evil movie barely making it out of post-production alive. Bryan spends the film scrambling through Raccoon City as everything collapses around him, which is a wild parallel to Cregger experiencing his own version of survival horror in the editing room.
Resident Evil is playing now in theaters, so be sure to check your local listings for showtimes.
