New Resident Evil Movie Debuts to Near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score

Sep 16, 2026 - 22:19

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New Resident Evil Movie Debuts to Near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score

Published Sep 16, 2026, 1:13 PM EDT

Zach Creggers continues his hot streak

Image from Resident Evil showing Austin Abrams' holding a machine gun on a snowy street

Anticipation for Zach Cregger's Resident Evil movie adaptation has been through the roof leading up to its release. The director of Barbarian and Weapons has made some of the best horror movies of the decade, and both moviegoers and fans of the Resident Evil video games have hoped he could revitalize the horror franchise on-screen with an actual, honest-to-god good movie. Because while we've gotten a handful of Resident Evil movies over the years, none of them have actually been decent.

Creggers has done just that and more with Resident Evil, which is a smash hit among critics. At the time of this writing, Resident Evil holds a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer based on 69 reviews. It's one of the most well-received movies of the year, alongside recent releases like Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (still at 100%), The Samurai and the Prisoner (97%) and Coyote vs. Acme (96%) and earlier 2026 releases like The Invite (96%) and The Sheep Detectives (95%).

What critics are saying in their Resident Evil reviews

Polygon's Jake Kleinman called Resident Evil a "near-perfect horror movie" in his positive review about how well Resident Evil translates the experience of playing a Resident Evil game. "Cregger takes his love for both the franchise and the genre and channels them into something we've never really seen before. Resident Evil is funny, scary, gross, and beautiful. Above all else, it captures the fight-or-flight experience of actually playing a Resident Evil game," he said.

"[Resident Evil is] far more faithful to the survival horror mechanics of its source than the earlier Milla Jovovich-led films, yet isn’t suffocated by fan service like the flop 2021 reboot Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City," The Independent's Clarisse Loughrey wrote in a four-out-of-five-star review. Collider's Carly Lane said "Austin Abrams is a fantastic lead" and that "Cregger's expert juggling act of horror and comedy is on full display here" in her 8/10 review.

Cregger's Resident Evil is based on Capcom's long-running game series, though it doesn't directly adapt the events of a specific game. (Sorry, you won't find Leon S. Kennedy kicking zombies in the face here.) Abrams stars as a medical courier who's as experienced with a gun as the average Resident Evil player. "I'd rather watch a movie starring a schlub who's, like, out of shape and has never fired a gun before!" Resident Evil director Zach Cregger recently told Polygon. Abrams isn't an out-of-shape schlub, but by all accounts he nails the feeling of being a scared player on the run from a hungry zombie. It also stars Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser.

Resident Evil will be released in theaters on Sept. 18.