Godzilla Minus Zero stomps to record openings in Japan and North America
Godzilla Minus Zero took $13.5 million on its opening Friday in the United States and Canada, including $6.7 million from Thursday previews, and is tracking for a $30 million to $33 million opening weekend that would make it the biggest domestic opening ever for a live-action foreign-language film.
The film played in 3,254 North American theatres from GKIDS, and the projected weekend would pass the $17.8 million opening of Zhang Yimou's Hero in 2004, the current record for a live-action foreign-language release. It would also be the biggest opening in the history of GKIDS, whose previous best was the $13 million debut of Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron in 2023. Opening-night audiences gave the film an A CinemaScore, a grade rarely handed to a non-English-language release.
The American opening follows a record start at home. Godzilla Minus Zero opened in Japan on 3 November, Godzilla Day, taking ¥910 million, about $5.7 million, from more than 590,000 admissions on its first day, which Toho said was the biggest opening day ever for a live-action film in Japan, Japanese or foreign. Its three-day total in Japan reached about ¥1.38 billion, roughly $8.7 million, and trade estimates put the worldwide opening at around $60 million.
The weekend figure is still a projection, not a final total, and the records come with limits worth stating plainly. Deadline, which reported the Friday number, noted it could not independently verify Toho's claim of a Japanese live-action opening-day record, and the overall opening-day record in Japan belongs to anime: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – Infinity Castle took ¥1.64 billion on its first day in July 2025, well above Minus Zero's ¥910 million. The film's first day also had a friendly launch, falling on a Japanese national holiday, so the first full weekend, 7 and 8 November, will say more about how long the run lasts than day one did. The $30 million to $33 million American projection is an estimate built from Friday's numbers; the confirmed total arrives with the final weekend figures.
The sequel, written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, picks up in 1949, two years after the events of Godzilla Minus One, with Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe returning. It is the first Japanese production filmed for IMAX and the first film in the franchise to carry an R rating, for violent content and bloody images. Minus One, which opened to $11.4 million in the United States in 2023, went on to earn $57.1 million domestically and more than $116 million worldwide, and won the Academy Award for best visual effects, the first Oscar in the franchise's history.
The film reaches India on 20 November through PVR INOX Pictures, and the final North American weekend total, due on Monday, 9 November, will settle whether the projected record holds.