Looking at the fall slate of blockbuster films, I was most interested in finding out whether Resident Evil or Street Fighter would have the bigger opening weekend. We now have our answer: Street Fighter grossed about half of what Resident Evil did in its first weekend. Deadline reports that Street Fighter, an adaptation of Capcom's series of fighting games, grossed $31 million its opening weekend.
By comparison, the Capcom horror game adaptation Resident Evil made $60 million its opening weekend and is still charting at the box office about a month after release. Street Fighter is opening lower than Mortal Kombat 2, another fighting game adaptation released this year, and doing worse than what you'd expect from a blockbuster movie. Ultimately, its gross ended up in line with industry pre-release expectations, though.
The real overperformer of the weekend was the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, which had the second-biggest opening for a theatrically released documentary ever at $15 million. Street Fighter and Resident Evil took two very different approaches to adaptations. Street Fighter leaned into well-known characters, fan service, and the wackiness of the IP to draw people in.
Meanwhile, Resident Evil took the essence and themes of its franchise and used them to tell a completely original story. Despite the backlash caused by Resident Evil not featuring any characters from the games, its success compared to Street Fighter suggests that it is the better route for adaptations to take. We'll just have to wait and see how both movies continue to perform as they stay in theaters through the Halloween holiday and go up against competition like Clayface.
According to Deadline, these were the top ten highest-grossing films of this weekend
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