Godzilla Minus Zero leads box office with estimated $31.6 million opening

A Japanese film about a family confronting another catastrophe in postwar Japan has taken the lead at U.S. and Canadian cinemas. Godzilla Minus Zero opened to an estimated $31.6 million for the November 6–8 weekend, ahead of The Cat in the Hat at $20.5 million, according to TheWrap’s Sunday report.

That gives distributor GKIDS its biggest opening, comfortably exceeding the $13 million debut of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. It also brings a substantially larger launch to the follow-up to Godzilla Minus One, whose December 2023 opening was $11.4 million. These remain estimates: The Numbers attributes the new projection to GKIDS, with Sunday’s business still forecast rather than fully counted.

For anyone whose acquaintance with Godzilla chiefly involves Hollywood’s giant-monster encounters, this is a different storyline. Minus One comes from Toho, the Japanese studio that originated Godzilla; it is separate from Legendary’s Hollywood MonsterVerse, as Netflix’s guide explains. Watching those Hollywood films is therefore not preparation for this particular sequel.

The relevant connection is to Minus One. Director Takashi Yamazaki returns, and GKIDS says the new film continues the Shikishima family’s story in 1949, two years after the preceding film’s events. Its setting keeps the monster’s destruction close to people attempting to recover their daily lives after war. That is the distributor’s description of the premise, rather than a judgment here about how successfully the film delivers it.

The size of the box-office jump is easy to check: 31.6 ÷ 11.4 ≈ 2.8. In dollars, the sequel’s reported opening is about 2.8 times its predecessor’s. Using The Numbers’ more precise $11,419,975 figure for Minus One produces the same rounded result.

Both opening totals include screenings before the official Friday release, but their calendars differ. Minus Zero began North American IMAX early access on November 3—“Godzilla Day,” marking the original film’s Japanese release anniversary—before expanding into standard and premium formats on November 6, according to GKIDS’ announcement. For Minus One, contemporaneous reporting placed $2.1 million from Wednesday and Thursday previews inside its opening Friday figure, and consequently its weekend total.

So the calculation compares reported launches, rather than identical periods of screenings. The sequel also had a wider opening: 3,254 locations, compared with its predecessor’s 2,308. The dollar comparison is not adjusted for inflation and does not establish that 2.8 times as many tickets were sold.

IMAX was a substantial part of the new opening. The Numbers reports $12.7 million from those screens, roughly 40% of the total. Without admissions and comparable ticket-price data, the receipts cannot separate audience growth from differences in what tickets cost. Nor is the headline gross the amount retained by the distributor or a measure of profit.

The predecessor offers a useful reminder that an opening is only one chapter of a theatrical run. Minus One followed its $11.4 million debut with an $8.6 million second weekend, a decline of about 25%. Its eventual domestic total reached $57.1 million—meaning roughly four-fifths of its receipts arrived after opening weekend, according to The Numbers’ release history.