The Big Picture

  • Godzilla Minus One surpasses $40 million domestically, becoming the sixth highest-grossing foreign-language film in North America.
  • The film has generated almost $34 million from overseas markets, with $31 million coming from Japan.
  • Despite a lower budget, Godzilla Minus One has received excellent reviews and is poised for serious awards consideration.

Despite dropping out of the top five on the domestic box office chart this weekend, Toho’s word-of-mouth hit, Godzilla Minus One, passed a major milestone. The film has now grossed $40 million domestically, which puts it at the number six spot on the list of highest-grossing live-action foreign-language films in North America, ahead of Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, which made $37 million domestically back in 2006.

Godzilla Minus One grossed $2.7 million in its fourth weekend at the domestic box office — there was a time when it was only expected to play for one week — and is eyeing over $4 million across the extended Christmas weekend. The movie has also generated nearly $34 million from overseas markets so far, of which $31 million has come from its home country, Japan. This takes the period kaiju film’s cumulative global gross to $74 million, which puts it just $4 million short of overtaking 2016’s Shin Godzilla at the global box office.

While these figures might not seem like a lot, especially in comparison to the hundreds of millions that Legendary’s English-language MonsterVerse movies seem to generate on a regular basis, Godzilla Minus One also didn’t cost as much as those films. It was reportedly produced on a budget of just $15 million, which is less than a 10th of what the MonsterVerse’s most recent installments — Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla: King of the Monsters — were mounted on.

'Godzilla Minus One' Is Poised for Serious Awards Consideration

Set in postwar Japan of the 1940s, Godzilla Minus One has also been significantly better reviewed than pretty much any major Hollywood blockbuster in recent memory, barring a few, of course. The movie currently sits at a “certified fresh” 98% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. It also earned an excellent A CinemaScore from opening day audiences, and prompted Collider’s Chase Hutchinson to call it “one of the best recent entries in the series.”

Directed by Takashi Yamazaki, Godzilla Minus One is the 37th overall film in the Godzilla franchise, which began as an allegorical tale about the dangers of nuclear war in 1954. It is also the fifth entry in the franchise’s Reiwa era, and comes at a time when interest in the iconic character is arguably at an all-time high. The MonsterVerse recently expanded to streaming with the well-reviewed Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+. The series will continue next year with director Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, but before that, fans can expect Godzilla Minus One to mount a full-throated awards campaign. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.

Godzilla Minus One Film Poster
Godzilla Minus One
PG-13Sci-FiActionAdventureDrama

Post war Japan is at its lowest point when a new crisis emerges in the form of a giant monster, baptized in the horrific power of the atomic bomb.

Release Date
December 1, 2023
Director
Takashi Yamazaki
Cast
Ryûnosuke Kamiki , Minami Hamabe , Yûki Yamada , Sakura Andō
Main Genre
Sci-Fi
Writers
Ishirô Honda , Takeo Murata , Takashi Yamazaki

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