Resident Evil is the widest film in Malaysia this week, with 453 IMAX sessions at 16 cinemas

No film in Malaysia has more sessions this week than Resident Evil. This site's listings for 19 to 25 September have Zach Cregger's reboot at 109 cinemas with 3,929 sessions, at GSC, TGV, FST, Mega and Amerin, and 453 of those sessions are in IMAX at 16 cinemas. It opened on Wednesday, Malaysia Day, at TGV and on Thursday at GSC, two days before the United States and the United Kingdom, and Saturday alone has 1,278 sessions listed.

A courier, a package and Racoon City

Screen Daily's review, by Nikki Baughan on 16 September, gives the shape of it. Austin Abrams is Bryan, a courier who has to get an urgent package through the Colorado mountains to Racoon City while a virus escaped from the Umbrella Corporation turns the infected into mutated killers; Paul Walter Hauser, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Will Merrick support. The review's judgement is that Cregger cuts through the sprawling mythology of the earlier films and resets the franchise, leaning on the games for its weapons and its creatures rather than reinventing them, with the monsters done as practical effects and the camera in constant motion. It calls the result "a hugely entertaining genre actioner" that should serve newcomers and fans alike, if not as inventive as Weapons.

Screen Daily's preview of the British opening puts the film in context: it is the eighth film to adapt the video game and the second reboot, and Sony is opening it in 608 venues there. The comparison the paper draws is with Cregger's own Weapons, which opened in the United Kingdom to £2.6 million, topped the chart for three weekends in a row and finished on about £11.8 million; the best opening of the earlier Resident Evil films was Afterlife 3D in 2010 at £1.7 million. The worldwide opening figures arrive after the weekend, and this site will not guess at them.

Why the IMAX number matters here

The chains have given this film the premium halls that Hope held last week. Of this week's 3,929 sessions, 453 are IMAX at 16 cinemas, 359 are in Dolby Atmos halls, 107 in D-BOX motion seats, 91 in TGV's Indulge halls and 52 in 4DX at five GSC cinemas: GSC 1 Utama, GSC IOI City Mall in Putrajaya, GSC LaLaport BBCC, GSC Southkey Mall and GSC Paradigm Mall in Johor Bahru. Kuala Lumpur has 1,130 sessions this week, Selangor 836 and Johor 488, and 160 sessions start after midnight, which for a horror film is a feature rather than a scheduling accident.

Before you book

The classification is 18, so it is an adults-only booking, and the chains list it at 93 minutes, which makes it the shortest wide release of the month by some distance: a 9:30pm session is out before 11:15pm, and the IMAX sessions run late into the evening at the city cinemas. The listings drop sharply from Thursday 24 September, when the chains' published week runs out rather than when the film does; the sessions for that weekend will appear as the chains release them.

The Resident Evil page lists every cinema and session with the format marked on each, so the IMAX and 4DX sessions are easy to pick out, and the showtimes page puts every cinema's Resident Evil times side by side. Every session links to the cinema's own booking page; the listings are refreshed from each chain every hour.