Zach Cregger's 'Resident Evil' opens to a franchise-best $108 million

Zach Cregger's Resident Evil opened to $108 million on September 22, the largest opening in the franchise's history.

The number matters beyond the one title. Video-game adaptations spent two decades as the genre Hollywood could not crack, and the correction has been so complete that a franchise-best opening for a series this old now reads as ordinary rather than as a surprise. Cregger arrives from original horror rather than from studio franchise work, which is increasingly the profile studios are hiring against for this kind of material.

A day earlier, on September 21, a sequel to World War Z was confirmed to be alive again after years in development limbo. Brad Pitt returns, and Edward Berger is set to direct.

Berger is a pointed choice. His recent work sits at the prestige end of the business rather than the large-scale-action end, and hiring him for a zombie tentpole suggests the sequel is being positioned as something other than a straight retread of the 2013 original.

Both stories run against the same backdrop as this week's other headline: a $111 billion consolidation working its way through the courts, with a negotiated floor on how many films get made. A franchise-best opening is a good week. A settlement that has to specify a minimum slate is a comment on the decade.