Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil opened at No. 1 at the UK-Ireland box office, taking £4.2 million over the September 18–20 weekend. The Sony horror delivered the biggest opening weekend for the Resident Evil franchise in the region, starting well ahead of every previous film in the series. Meanwhile, Practical Magic 2 stayed in second place, while Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom opened in fourth.
Resident Evil earned £4.2 million from 608 locations, giving it a location average of £6,926. The opening is more than double the £1.7 million opening of 2010’s Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D, which had previously recorded the franchise’s biggest opening in the UK and Ireland. The new film has already come close to passing that film’s £4.8 million lifetime total, which remains the highest-grossing result for a Resident Evil movie in the territory.
The performance is also notable when compared with the other live-action films in the series. The original Resident Evil, released in 2002, finished its UK-Ireland run with £2.8 million, meaning Cregger’s film has already opened above the lifetime totals of six other live-action entries. The previous theatrical film, 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, finished with only around £585,000 in the region.
The opening also gives Cregger another strong start following his 2025 horror film Weapons. That film opened to £2.6 million from 630 locations in the UK and Ireland and eventually finished with £11.9 million. Resident Evil has therefore started significantly ahead of Cregger’s previous film, with the £10 million mark now an early target for the new release.
Behind Resident Evil, Practical Magic 2 dropped to second place in its second weekend. The Warner Bros. sequel earned £1.5 million, a 47% decline from its opening weekend, and has now reached £5.6 million in total. That figure has already passed the £3.3 million lifetime gross of the original 1998 film in the UK and Ireland.
Anthony Maras’ Second World War drama Pressure held third place with £1.1 million in its second weekend. The film fell by 26% and has now collected £4.3 million for Studiocanal.
Aardman’s Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom opened in fourth place with just over £1 million from 647 locations, with a location average of £1,585. Including previews, the film has reached £1.5 million. The new release is below the £2.1 million opening of 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie, which eventually made £13.8 million, but it has started ahead of 2019’s Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, which opened to £1.3 million and finished with £7.1 million.
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey rounded out the top five in its tenth weekend. The Universal epic added £587,000, down 34% from the previous weekend, taking its UK-Ireland total to £85.8 million. It remains the 10th highest-grossing film of all time in the territory, just behind Avengers: Endgame at £88.7 million.
The weekend also saw Spider-Man: Brand New Day continue its strong run. The Sony release added £571,000 in its eighth weekend, bringing its total to £99 million and keeping it as the third highest-grossing film in UK-Ireland box office history. It remains behind Skyfall, which stands at £102.8 million.
Overall, the UK-Ireland top five films collected £8.4 million during the September 18–20 weekend. That was 10% higher than the previous weekend and 38% ahead of the same weekend last year. With new releases including Sense and Sensibility and Brad Pitt’s Heart of the Beast arriving next weekend, the market could see another increase in overall box office.
With its record franchise opening, Resident Evil has given the long-running horror series a strong new start in the UK and Ireland. Its performance over the coming weeks will determine whether it can turn that opening into the biggest overall result yet for the franchise in the territory.
