Godzilla Minus Zero opens in North American theatres on Friday, 6 November, and early forecasts put the film on course for the top of the weekend box office. Boxoffice Pro projects an opening of $25 million to $35 million for the film, which arrives from Toho and distributor GKIDS. A result inside that range would more than double the $11.4 million opening of its predecessor, Godzilla Minus One, in December 2023.
The sequel opened in Japan on 3 November, a date Toho chose to mark Godzilla Day and the 72nd anniversary of the character. The film premiered at the New York Film Festival on 26 September, where early reviews praised it, and it now holds a 90 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, according to Boxoffice Pro. IMAX screenings are part of the North American release, and the film is the first Japanese production filmed for IMAX.
Godzilla Minus Zero box office forecast leads the weekend
Variety puts the opening at about $30 million from 3,254 theatres in North America. That would leave Warner Bros. Animation’s The Cat in the Hat behind it, with forecasts of $20 million to $25 million from about 4,000 venues. Box Office Theory gives a similar range of $25 million to $35 million for Godzilla Minus Zero, and its wider forecast for the full North American run stretches from $53 million to $94 million.
The scale of the opening would set a record for GKIDS. The distributor’s biggest release so far is The Boy and the Heron, which took $47.3 million in North America. Boxoffice Pro also noted that IMAX screenings should help the foreign language tentpole reach the top of the charts. Godzilla Minus One finished with $57.1 million in North America, a strong result for a postwar period drama told entirely from a Japanese point of view.
What Godzilla Minus Zero brings to the screen
Takashi Yamazaki returns as director after Godzilla Minus One, which won the Academy Award for best visual effects. Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe return in the lead roles. The film introduces King Ghidorah as a new adversary, and Yamazaki has said the budget was larger than the first film, although the exact figure has not been made public. Variety has reported a production budget of $92 million for Godzilla Minus Zero.
Yamazaki told IGN that he had to set aside the urge to outdo the first film, and that trying to top it for awards, scale or commercial success was the wrong reason to make a sequel. The interview, published before the release, framed the new film as a separate story rather than a bigger version of the last one.
The film had its Hollywood premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre on 29 October, where the crowd gave Yamazaki and stars Kamiki and Hamabe a standing ovation. Early IMAX showings in the United States began on 3 November, the same day Godzilla Minus Zero opened in Japan. Yamazaki has said Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar was a major inspiration for filming in IMAX, and the choice gives the sequel a larger screen presence than the first film had.
Godzilla Minus Zero and the weekend ahead
The film opens on Friday in the United States and Canada. Thursday night preview screenings are included in the weekend totals reported by tracking firms. The final figure will not be clear until studio estimates arrive on Sunday, with final totals on Monday. Boxoffice Pro said the opening would be a big win for Toho’s Godzilla series and for GKIDS, for whom Godzilla Minus Zero would become the biggest release to date.
For Toho, the opening is the next step in a run that began with a film reported to cost $10 million to $15 million in 2023 and grew into an Oscar winner. Godzilla Minus Zero now has the widest opening of any film in the series in North America, and the weekend will show whether the audience that found the first film returns in larger numbers.