Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil movie has done big numbers at the box office since it hit theaters on September 18, but has that been reflected in increased Resident Evil game sales? According to new data, a set of fresh discounts prior to the movie’s release did most of the heavy lifting for a surge in Resident Evil sales, and after the film landed, there was a “modest” bump in sales.
According to Alinea analyst Rhys Elliott, Capcom discounted several Resident Evil games on September 10 and kept those savings active after Cregger’s movie arrived. “Almost all the copy movement was on PlayStation,” Elliott wrote. “Resident Evil 2 nearly doubled on PS5 while doing just +16% on Steam, and Resident Evil 4 jumped +77% on PS5 versus a flat 0% on Steam. RE2 and RE4 picked up another 50-65% in PS5 copies even after you strip the discount out, which makes sense: they have a mix of nostalgia, quality, and the exact Raccoon City setting the film runs around in. On Steam, the same movie effect is a much milder +11% to +14%.”
As Elliott noted, the older Resident Evil games currently cost much less than Capcom charged when they first went on sale, while the latest game in the series, Resident Evil Requiem, got a 30% discount and was $49 this month before its price went back up to $70. Overall, there was higher engagement across the entire series, as the film reactivated an existing fanbase of players who already owned Resident Evil games.
“The movie tells an original story with a new lead, so newcomers have no obvious game to jump into,” Elliott wrote. “The horror-film audience and the horror-game audience overlap heavily. Cregger is a draw in his own right after Barbarian and Weapons. An opportunity is next year’s Resident Evil Veronica, which already has almost 2 million Steam wishlists. It stars Claire Redfield and, if it follows the original timeline, is set three months after Raccoon City, the event the film is built around. If the streaming release is timed to Veronica’s launch, Capcom and Sony could finally build the on-ramp that most transmedia projects are missing. Still, transmedia stuff isn’t having the impact it could.”
In its second week at the box office, Resident Evil was dethroned by the Avengers. Ahead of the release of Avengers: Doomsday, Disney brought Avengers: Endgame back to theaters, taking first place with a North American box office haul of $26 million for the re-release. Resident Evil dropped to second place, but overall, the movie is still doing impressive numbers.
After an opening weekend that surpassed expectations, Resident Evil has now made over $196 million at the global box office. That makes it the fourth highest-grossing live-action Resident Evil movie so far, but it still has a way to go before it dethrones the current king of that list, 2016’s Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and its $312 million box office gross. Cregger’s film has received critical acclaim since launch–even if people were iffy on its ending–and on GameSpot’s Sister site, Metacritic, the movie has a metascore of 79 from 51 reviews.
“By backing away from the stories and characters of the video games, Cregger dodges the giant bullet of ‘that’s not my Leon Kennedy’ and instead lets us finally experience Resident Evil ourselves, through our own eyes,” Eric Frederiksen wrote in GameSpot’s Resident Evil movie review.