The first reviews for Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil are spectacular. Its Rotten Tomatoes score has already moved between 96 and 98 per cent—and critics say it may be the first live-action movie to capture what playing Resident Evil actually feels like.
Those are dangerous words to put near this franchise.
Resident Evil fans have spent nearly a quarter of a century watching Hollywood discover increasingly inventive ways to use the name while wandering away from the games. Some of those movies are wonderfully silly. Several are entertaining. “Faithful” has rarely been the first word anybody reaches for.
The 2026 reboot takes another risky path. It does not retell the Spencer Mansion incident or place Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield in the middle of Raccoon City. Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier dragged into an original nightmare running parallel to events around Resident Evil 2.
On paper, that sounded like another adaptation running away from the source.
The first critics say Zach Cregger may have found a smarter route.
Resident Evil opened with an almost perfect score
Rotten Tomatoes published its first-review roundup on 16 September. The Tomatometer opened around 98 per cent before settling at 96 per cent as more reviews arrived. That number will continue moving as the release expands, but the early consensus is unusually strong.
Critics repeatedly call it the best live-action Resident Evil movie. Some go further and place it among the best game adaptations ever made.
The praise is remarkably consistent. Reviewers describe a brisk 90-minute horror ride with strong practical creatures, grotesque body horror, carefully earned jump scares and a surprisingly funny central performance from Abrams. Variety’s review says the film is different and much better than the earlier movies, while the Rotten Tomatoes survey finds critics repeatedly praising its momentum and creature design.
There are reservations. Several critics say the ending feels abrupt, the final battle becomes too goofy and the supporting cast never receives enough room. The humour also appears to be the dividing line: some reviewers think it keeps the film alive, while others argue it punctures scenes that should have remained frightening.
That is a healthier kind of disagreement than we usually see around this series. Nobody is arguing over whether the movie understands that Resident Evil should contain horror.
Is the new Resident Evil movie faithful?
Yes—but apparently not in the way purists may expect.
The film is not a scene-by-scene recreation of any Capcom game. Bryan is an original protagonist. Leon, Jill and Claire are absent. Critics note that even familiar franchise terminology is used selectively, with one review observing that the T-virus is not directly named.
Yet reviewers keep returning to the same idea: Cregger adapts the player’s experience rather than merely copying the plot.
The camera follows Bryan into dim spaces where danger may be sitting just outside the frame. Resources feel limited. His decisions become increasingly desperate. Creatures escalate from familiar infected bodies into elaborate biological horrors. The third-person cinematography reportedly makes turning a corner feel like moving through one of the games.
That distinction answers the question we raised in our earlier feature, Resident Evil 2026: true survival horror or reanimated IP? Faithfulness does not have to mean watching an actor search a desk until a box of handgun ammunition appears. It can mean preserving the dread, strange humour, escalating mutations and feeling that every door is a terrible idea you must open anyway.
That approach may annoy viewers who want recognisable heroes and exact lore. One critic quoted by Rotten Tomatoes still prefers the animated adaptations for direct fidelity. Others warn that the film sometimes feels more like a loving homage than a literal adaptation.
But this may be the compromise the movies have needed. A filmmaker can work inside Capcom’s world without making a two-hour cutscene compilation.
The monsters sound properly disgusting
Most encouraging is the enthusiasm for the creatures.
The review roundup describes enormous puppets, practical effects enhanced with digital work and monsters that grow stranger as Bryan travels deeper into the outbreak. Critics mention exploding heads, dismemberment, whipping limbs, eyeballs and designs that sit comfortably beside the series’ Lovecraftian mutations.
That matters because Resident Evil should never feel clean. The games balance corporate laboratories and military hardware against wet, diseased biology. Their best monsters look as though something inside the human body has misunderstood the assignment.
Cregger’s own filmography makes that enthusiasm believable. Barbarian and Weapons showed a director who can build dread, break tension with uncomfortable comedy and then reveal something audiences wish they had never seen. The early response suggests he has brought those instincts to Raccoon City without treating the games as embarrassing source material.
It also gives this movie an advantage in a crowded adaptation year. The new Street Fighter trailer is chasing visual fidelity through costumes, signature moves and an enormous roster. Resident Evil appears to be chasing emotional fidelity: the specific anxiety of being underprepared in a place that keeps getting worse.
The audience score will tell us something critics cannot
At the time of writing, the Rotten Tomatoes movie page does not yet have a meaningful audience verdict. The film opens in cinemas on 18 September, so an empty or zeroed Popcornmeter before general release should not be mistaken for viewers rejecting it.
The audience score will be especially useful here.
Critics can judge pacing, filmmaking and whether an adaptation works as a movie. Fans will answer a slightly different question: does this feel like Resident Evil when you already know the herbs, monsters, corporations and absurd locks?
That score is not automatically more truthful. Fan ratings can be dragged around by hype, review campaigns and franchise loyalty. It may still better capture whether people who came for Capcom’s particular flavour of survival horror feel served by an original protagonist.
POPTOPIC’s Halloween horror guide is built around the simple test of whether something is enjoyable to watch in the dark. The early reviews suggest Resident Evil passes that test with a bucket beneath it.
For now, the verdict is unusually hopeful.
Cregger has not recreated a game. He appears to have recreated the sensation of playing one.
After nine live-action movies, that may be the faithful adaptation Resident Evil needed all along.
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