Weekly

Resident Evil Lands, and Late Night Starts to Fade

This week in movies and TV: Zach Cregger's Resident Evil opens wide after a Fantastic Fest premiere, a cursed-kiss horror goes straight to digital, and the loudest television stories of the week were about boardrooms instead of shows.

Friday, September 18, 2026 · By MoviesPack

For three straight weeks this column has been reporting a nearly empty theater. That ends today. One film is doing all the heavy lifting, and it happens to be the riskiest bet in the calendar: a video game adaptation, from a comedy actor turned horror director, opening the weekend before awards season starts clearing its throat.

Everything else this week went quietly to your living room. So the shape of the week is odd. There is exactly one event, a handful of genre films you can start watching in the next ten minutes, and a television business that generated more headlines than television itself.

The one thing in theaters

Resident Evil (2026)

Resident Evil premiered at Fantastic Fest last night and goes wide today. The premise is much smaller than the franchise's reputation suggests: Bryan is a medical courier, he has a delivery to make, and over one night the city around him comes apart. That's the whole pitch. No Umbrella Corporation boardroom, no Alice in a red dress, just a guy with a job and a bad shift. That restraint is the interesting choice, and it's very much Zach Cregger's instinct. He made Barbarian, which spent its first act pretending to be a movie about a rental booking, and then Weapons, which was structured as a set of overlapping accounts of one unexplainable event. Cregger builds horror out of ordinary logistics. Someone has an address, someone has a shift, someone has a task to finish, and the world quietly stops cooperating. Applying that to Resident Evil is smarter than it sounds, because the games have always worked the same way. You aren't a soldier. You're a person in a building with limited ammunition and a locked door. The other thing worth noting is the runtime: 95 minutes. In a year of 150-minute blockbusters, a studio horror film that gets in and out in an hour and a half is a statement of confidence. Austin Abrams plays Bryan, with Paul Walter Hauser, Zach Cherry and Kali Reis around him, which is a cast built for people who are funny under pressure rather than heroic under pressure. Early numbers are thin but pointed: an 8.1 average on TMDB, though only from 26 votes so far, so treat it as a first impression rather than a verdict. The full rating breakdown will get more interesting once the opening weekend audience files in. If you'd rather wait for it at home, where to watch Resident Evil will update the moment a digital date exists, though for a film built on darkness and sound design, the theater is the version worth having. Worth remembering: the last time this franchise hit screens, it was the 2002 Paul W.S. Anderson version, which turned into six films and a great deal of slow motion. This one is trying to be a horror movie rather than an action franchise. That's the experiment.

Quietly released, easily watched

The Last Kiss (2026)

The Last Kiss slipped onto digital Monday with no fanfare at all, which is a shame, because the hook is one of the better teen-horror premises in a while. Laurel wants her first kiss to be the thing movies promised her. What she gets instead is a curse: kiss someone, and you see how they die. Then a vision shows her that her crush is headed for a murder spree already underway. It's 97 minutes and it sits at a 6.3, which in the teen horror economy means competent rather than special. But the idea is doing real work. The whole genre runs on the fear that intimacy costs you something, and this literalizes it about as bluntly as possible. If it lands for you, Talk to Me and Smile are the two recent films working the same nerve, and It Follows is still the best version of the premise anyone has managed. Where to watch The Last Kiss has the current rental options.

Heart of the Beast (2026)

Out tomorrow, and it is the week's most straightforward proposition. A Special Forces officer named James Belmont survives a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness with his combat dog, Odin, and the two of them have to walk out. That's it. No twist, no conspiracy, 101 minutes of cold and distance and one man talking to a dog. I have a soft spot for this kind of film. Survival stories are the only genre where slowness is a feature, because the whole point is that nothing is coming to save you quickly. Heart of the Beast will either be a lean piece of craft or ninety minutes of scenery, and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet. Nothing in the numbers tells you which. Filling out the week: Forgotten Island played the Manila International Film Festival earlier this month and reaches US theaters on September 25, with a premise I liked more the longer I thought about it. Two best friends celebrate their last night before graduation, stumble through a portal to an island, and discover that the memories of their friendship are what the place runs on. That's a genuinely sad idea dressed up as an adventure. Its 8.8 average comes from six votes, so it means nothing yet, but the setup is doing something real. If you missed the last two weeks, The Runner is still the best-attended new thriller on offer, Mayday has the strongest audience score of anything released this month, and Practical Magic 2 and Drawn Together are both out there if you want something that isn't trying to frighten you.

What's worth your couch time

Lanterns dropped a midseason trailer on HBO Max this week, which tells you the show is confident enough about its back half to sell it separately. Five weeks in, the Green Lantern series is still the most-watched scripted thing on television, and I'm still slightly surprised to be typing that. Lioness and Ted Lasso remain the other two shows carrying the month.

Everything else in television this week happened off-screen, and it was a strange batch. The FCC signed off on Middle East investment in the Paramount and Warner Bros deal, Paramount is reportedly threatening to move production out of California, and Jimmy Kimmel's future stayed unresolved while the broader question got louder: whether the late-night format survives this decade at all. My read is that it doesn't survive in its current shape. A monologue built for an 11:35pm audience is competing with clips of itself that do better numbers the next morning. The show is now a factory for the clips.

Two casting items worth flagging. Noah Hawley's Far Cry series at FX added Brendan Gleeson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hamish Linklater and Sam Spruell to a cast that already had Steve Buscemi and Lizzy Caplan, which is an unreasonably good ensemble for a game adaptation. Fallout proved the model works and now nobody in television is embarrassed about the source material. And the BBC is asking producers to pitch a new vision for Doctor Who, which is the most public a soft reboot has ever been.

Coming next

The 23rd is the next real cluster. The Love Hypothesis arrives on Prime Video, adapting Ali Hazelwood's fake-dating academia romance about a biology PhD candidate and the professor everyone's afraid of. Possible Love runs a startling 165 minutes for a story about two couples, a documentary shoot, and desires nobody planned to say out loud. Primetime lands the same day.

Then October opens properly. Digger is the one I'm actually waiting for: Alejandro González Iñárritu's first film in years, hitting US theaters October 2, about the most powerful man on earth racing to prove he saved humanity from a disaster he caused. Iñárritu has never once made a small film and I don't expect restraint here. The same day brings Verity, Michael Showalter's adaptation of the Colleen Hoover thriller, where a struggling writer takes a job finishing a bestselling author's manuscripts and starts reading things she wasn't meant to see. A week later Rob Savage's Other Mommy arrives, and the premise (a girl befriends something in her house wearing her mother's face) is exactly the kind of thing Savage does well.

What everyone's talking about

The Resident Evil fanbase spent the week in a state I'd describe as cautious euphoria. r/residentevil set up impression and review megathreads ahead of the premiere, cosplayers turned out for the screenings in Jill Valentine and Claire Redfield outfits, and one widely upvoted post simply declared it the film of the year, which is the sort of thing people say before the second weekend. r/boxoffice was doing the arithmetic in real time. Trackers there put Thursday previews somewhere around $8.5 to $9 million and were talking about a $60 million-plus opening weekend, crediting reviews they pegged at 96% positive and expecting strong walk-ups. Those are community projections rather than studio numbers, so hold them loosely. But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and it almost never happens to this genre: a video game adaptation is arriving with critical goodwill already banked.

The rest of the box office chart is a reminder of how long this year's giants have been standing. The Odyssey passed $604 million domestic and is still adding more than a million on a Wednesday, nine weeks in. Practical Magic 2 actually topped Wednesday's chart at $1.7 million. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is closing on $937 million. And Coyote vs. Acme, the film that spent years in a vault, has quietly reached $49.87 million domestic, which for a movie nobody expected to see at all is a genuinely nice ending.

Over on r/television the mood was more cynical, understandably, given that half the feed was merger paperwork. Pierce Brosnan and Helen Mirren both went out of their way to knock down reports of a feud with Tom Hardy on MobLand, with Brosnan describing it as reaching out to a friend. Someone asked what Disney is even doing with the Muppets anymore, and nobody had a good answer. Edie Falco is heading to a Fox legal drama. The weekly what-are-you-watching thread was, as usual, the most useful thing on the subreddit.

The bottom line

If you leave the house once this week, it's for Resident Evil, and go before the internet spoils the structure, because Cregger's whole method is built on withholding the shape of the thing. If you don't, The Last Kiss is on digital right now and Heart of the Beast lands tomorrow, and both are small enough to start on a whim. Then keep October 2 clear. Iñárritu doesn't release often, and the last three weeks of empty theaters were clearly everyone getting out of his way.

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