Resident Evil and films based on video games: the story of a multi-billion industry

Over the following three decades, there were plenty of other attempts: Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Tomb Raider all enjoyed modest box-office success, but none managed to establish a proper film franchise.

Resident Evil was first released in Japan in 1996 under the name Biohazard. The game, directed by Shinji Mikami, trapped the player in a mansion full of zombies, with corridors packed with jump scares. Capcom thus helped to define and popularise the survival horror genre.

 It hit cinemas in 2002, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and starring Milla Jovovich: the film cost $35 million and grossed $103.8 million, kicking off a long series of feature films. A further five films followed over the next 14 years, following a model characterised by limited budgets and an increasingly international audience. Critical reception remained modest, but the films continued to be box-office hits: Afterlife, the fourth film in the series, grossed $295.9 million in 2010, whilst The Final Chapter, the sixth instalment released in 2016, grossed $314.1 million.

The first six films starring Jovovich cost a total of $292.5 million to make and grossed $1.23 billion: this works out at $4.2 at the box office for every dollar spent on production. This is not the producers’ actual profit margin, as cinema operators retain a portion of the takings and marketing, distribution, interest and fees must be added to the budget, but the result remains a success for the franchise. The franchise has also enjoyed international popularity, particularly in Asia: in China, The Final Chapter grossed as much as 161.5 million, compared with just 26.8 in the United States.

 The winning streak came to an end with Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, the 2021 reboot which cost 25 million and took 41.9 million at the box office, largely due to the pandemic. A return of 1.7 times the budget is normally too low to cover all expenses.

Since the Covid pandemic, however, the industry has changed significantly: Nintendo was directly involved in the production of The Super Mario Bros. Movie in 2023, and the film grossed 1.36 billion on a budget of 100 million: Deadline estimated a net profit of 559 million for the production. Five Nights at Freddy’s, a 20-million horror film created for a young and highly active online community, grossed 297.2 million. Minecraft, finally, came close to the billion mark in 2025 on a budget of 150 million. The TV series The Last of Us, produced by HBO in collaboration with Sony and the game’s creators, then arrived on the small screen, attracting 8.2 million viewers for the first-season finale.

The commercial advantage of adapting a video game for the big screen is shared with other recent industry successes, such as comic-book films and live-action Disney classics: the fanbase. An original film has to win over an audience unfamiliar with the subject matter, whereas an adaptation builds on characters who are already well-known and on players who are familiar with the brand.

This is usually an artistic constraint for the film, which must instead meet fans’ expectations and leaves the filmmakers with less creative freedom. The new Resident Evil is, however, an experiment: the new feature film is directed by Zach Cregger, who secured the 2026 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Amy Madigan in Weapons, his latest feature film. For these reasons, Resident Evil has the potential to become a hit with both audiences and, potentially, critics too. It opens in cinemas in Italia on 17 September and in the United States on 18 September.