Godzilla Minus Zero Roars to $31.6m US Debut, Breaking Records

By Marcus Bennett

Godzilla Minus Zero earned $31.6m in the US and Canada on its opening weekend, setting the record for the biggest live-action foreign-language film debut at the North American box office. The 39th entry in a franchise dating back to 1954, shown in Japanese with English subtitles, took $63m worldwide.

Toho Global, the studio behind the film, had planned for exactly this scale. Koji Ueda, president of Toho Global, said in a statement: "This historic opening shows how deeply audiences around the world connect with Godzilla and with Takashi Yamazaki's vision. Our first near-simultaneous global release was built on that belief."

What does the record actually cover?

The film qualifies as live-action because it was principally shot on location, including at a sports park in Ibaraki, northeast of Tokyo, used for large crowd scenes, and at a temple in Maizuru in Kyoto prefecture. That distinction matters. It placed Minus Zero in direct competition with conventional Hollywood blockbusters rather than the animation category that usually hosts Japanese hits abroad.

In Japan, the numbers were just as striking. The film earned $5.75m on its opening day, 3 November, setting a first-day box office record for a live-action release in the country. Toho said the figure was more than double the opening-day earnings of Godzilla Minus One, the 2003 Oscar-winning predecessor whose sequel this film is. According to the Kyodo news agency, the domestic weekend also set a live-action record.

A three-headed opponent and a postwar setting

The story is set in Japan in 1949. Godzilla, lying "dead" at the bottom of the ocean two years earlier, resurfaces to confront a new threat to the country's postwar rebuilding: a dragon-like beast called Ghidorah. Directed by Takashi Yamazaki, the film shows a radioactively regenerated Godzilla facing the three-headed nemesis, which destroys buildings with lightning bolts fired from its mouth, with the help of human intervention.

How much did Imax and timing matter?

Industry experts said the near-simultaneous global release, on Imax and regular screens, easily exceeded expectations. David A Gross, an industry analyst, wrote: "This weekend's opening takes the Japanese production to a new level – it's nearly three times the previous opening [of Godzilla Minus One] in December 2023."

Imax screens generated 34% of the film's opening-weekend box office take. The film received an early Imax-only release the week before its wide opening, a strategy that appears to have built momentum.

A rival epic is close behind

Godzilla Minus Zero faces direct competition from Ramayana: Rise of a Legend, the Indian epic that earned $55.7m on its own opening weekend. The Hindi-language blockbuster, the most expensive Indian film ever made, took $32m in India and $8.7m in the US. Both films were produced in the Imax format, and both prove that large-format spectacle now travels across languages as readily as across borders.

The weekend's results suggest the formula — local language, global day-and-date release, premium screens — has moved from experiment to strategy, and that future Japanese productions will launch with worldwide ambition as standard.