Godzilla Minus Zero Roars to a Record $32 Million Opening Weekend

Godzilla Minus Zero has stomped straight to the top of the North American box office — and it is about to make history. The Japanese-language sequel took an estimated $14.5 million on Friday, including $6.7 million from Thursday-night previews, and trade projections put its three-day opening at around $32 million from 3,254 theatres. If that holds, it will be the biggest opening ever for a live-action film not in English in North America, comfortably passing the $17.8 million debut of Zhang Yimou’s Hero back in 2004. It is a remarkable result for a subtitled monster movie released by GKIDS and Toho, a combination that had been projecting an opening in the mid-$20 millions.

The scale of the jump is clearest when set against its predecessor. Godzilla Minus One opened to $11.4 million in North America in December 2023 before growing to $57.1 million domestically and another $56.9 million overseas, eventually becoming the first Japanese feature to win the Academy Award for best visual effects. Minus Zero’s Friday alone has already beaten Minus One’s entire opening weekend, and its Thursday previews on their own were worth more than half of that debut. The film had already broken records at home: it opened in Japan on November 3 — Godzilla Day, marking the 1954 original — with ¥910 million (about $5.75 million) from more than 590,000 admissions, the biggest opening day ever for a live-action film in Japan, according to Toho.

Audiences and critics are in unusual agreement. The film holds a 90 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, an A CinemaScore from opening-night audiences and a 96 percent Popcornmeter, and it is the first Japanese production ever filmed for IMAX. That last detail matters: roughly three-quarters of the domestic gross is coming from IMAX and other premium large-format screens, a sign that audiences are treating this as an event worth paying extra for. Director Takashi Yamazaki, returning with stars Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe and Min Tanaka, sets the story in postwar Japan, where a battered nation faces the three-headed Ghidorah and the possible return of Godzilla — spectacle with a human story underneath, made on a reported budget in the mid-teens of millions.

The rest of the weekend shows how crowded the frame was — and how decisively Zero won it. Warner Bros.’ The Cat in the Hat took $6 million on Friday on its way to about $18 million, a soft start for a $92 million animated film despite an A CinemaScore. Sony’s Ramayana: Rise of a Legend, the widest Indian release ever in North America, earned $2.4 million on Friday for a projected $7.3 million weekend, while Angel Studios’ Drummer Boy took $3.5 million and Searchlight’s Wild Horse Nine $2.4 million. On a weekend packed with new releases, the subtitled sequel was the one audiences chose first.

What to watch next: the record is still a projection, not a result. Studio estimates land on Sunday and final figures on Monday, and the true test is the weeks after — whether word of mouth carries Minus Zero past Minus One’s $57.1 million domestic total and toward a global opening tracking near $60 million. If it holds, the lesson for Hollywood is plain: a subtitled film, released with confidence on premium screens and marketed largely through social buzz, can out-open every English-language rival in the frame. That is a result distributors of international cinema will be studying for a long time. For more on the people behind the movies, browse our Did You Know collection.