Somewhere in Burbank, a marketing executive is staring at a spreadsheet and asking why the lizard with subtitles is beating the cat with Bill Hader. Godzilla Minus Zero took $14.5 million on Friday from 3,254 North American cinemas, previews included, and Deadline’s Saturday-morning numbers put its opening weekend at around $32 million. Variety and TheWrap have it at $30m and $31m respectively. These are projections, not Sunday’s studio estimates and certainly not Monday’s actuals, but even the cautious end of the range does something no subtitled live-action film has done in America before.
If the figure holds, Takashi Yamazaki’s film will have the biggest North American opening ever for a live-action foreign-language picture, pushing aside Zhang Yimou’s Hero, which opened to $17.8m in 2004 and has had the record to itself for 22 years. It would also be only the fourth non-English-language film ever to finish a weekend at No. 1 in the US. And it is about to triple the $11.4m opening of Godzilla Minus One, the 2023 film that won an Oscar for visual effects made on a budget Hollywood would spend on catering. Friday alone has already beaten Minus One‘s entire opening weekend, which is the box-office equivalent of Godzilla flattening Tokyo before lunch.
Audiences gave it an A CinemaScore, and the way they chose to watch it may be the most interesting part of the story. Cosmic Book News, citing Deadline, reports that about three-quarters of the weekend’s takings came from IMAX and other premium large-format screens. People are not treating a Japanese monster film as an art-house curiosity to catch on a wet Tuesday. They are booking the biggest screen in town, as if it were Dune. Which, with Dune: Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday both opening on 18 December, is something the people who schedule IMAX screens may want to bear in mind.
Hollywood’s main new wide release, meanwhile, is The Cat in the Hat, Warner Bros.’ animated Dr Seuss film with Bill Hader voicing the cat. It opened in 4,003 cinemas, about 750 more than Godzilla, earned an A CinemaScore of its own, and is heading for second place with around $18m. That is a perfectly respectable family opening. It is also what happens when you bring a striped hat to a fight with a radioactive dinosaur and a three-headed golden dragon.
Further down the chart, Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana: Rise of a Legend is the weekend’s other subtitled epic, and its story is rather different. In India it is enormous, with an opening-day net of around Rs 64.85 crore. In North America it took about $2.4m on Friday from 1,433 sites and is projected at $6m to $7m for the weekend, somewhere around fifth. Reports vary on the exact US numbers. Ten-headed demon kings, it seems, need a little more introduction to American audiences than a single-headed lizard does.
For anyone who has spent the last 70 years watching Godzilla films arrive in the West dubbed, recut and with Raymond Burr spliced in to reassure the locals, this is a quiet revolution. Toho no longer needs Legendary’s MonsterVerse to carry its monster abroad; it has done the job itself, in Japanese, with a fraction of the budget. Bong Joon-ho once talked about the “one-inch tall barrier of subtitles”. Godzilla is 50 metres tall, and appears to have stepped over it without noticing.
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We’ve already covered the film’s record-breaking start in Japan and rounded up the first reviews. As for the UK, we still can’t find a confirmed release date, so British kaiju fans may have to watch the Americans enjoy this for a while yet, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about a Japanese film. Sunday’s estimates arrive later today, and the actuals on Monday. Unless something very strange happens, the cat will be looking up at the lizard.
Sources: The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, FilmoFilia and Cosmic Book News.
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