Godzilla Minus Zero earned an estimated US$31.61 million in North America across its opening weekend, and no live-action foreign film has ever started bigger in the United States.
That figure lands on top of a Japanese launch that was already rewriting records. TOHO and GKIDS opened the film on Friday, November 6, four days after Japan got it on November 3, which is Godzilla Day, the anniversary of the original 1954 film’s release. Opening both markets inside the same week is something no Japan-produced Godzilla film had done before.
The comparison that matters for this site is Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle, which opened to US$70.6 million in September 2025, unadjusted. That is still the high-water mark for a foreign film in North America. Pokémon: The First Movie put up US$50.8 million across its first five days in July 1998. Both of those are animated films with years of franchise scaffolding behind them. Minus Zero is a live-action sequel to a 2023 film that plenty of people expected to be a curiosity.
It clears every previous GKIDS release by a wide margin. The Boy and the Heron, the strongest anime performer the company has had, opened to US$13 million in 2023. Minus Zero more than doubled it.
Premium formats did most of the work
A record 74% of the weekend gross came from premium large format showings, with 40% of the total, roughly US$12 million, from IMAX alone. The film is the first Japanese production to meet the standard required to market itself as “filmed for IMAX,” which is a technical claim about how it was shot rather than a marketing flourish.
Japan’s numbers were just as strange. On opening day the film sold 590,000 tickets for 910 million yen, about US$5.75 million. That is the highest opening day for any live-action film in the territory, domestic or imported, and it ran 201% above what Godzilla Minus One did on its own first day in 2023. Worldwide gross sits at US$63 million after one weekend; Deadline reported it as the top film on the planet for those three days.
The release pattern is worth pausing on. Minus Zero also opened the same week across Latin America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, with further dates still to be announced. TOHO bought GKIDS in October 2024, and the North American release came through both companies. Day-and-date launches of Japanese films used to be a logistical headache because rights were scattered across separate distributors in each territory. Owning the distributor removes a big chunk of that friction.
Cast and crew
Takashi Yamazaki is back as director, screenwriter and VFX supervisor, the same three jobs he held on Minus One. Naoki Satō returned to compose, and Shirogumi handled the visual effects. The story is set in 1949, two years after the events of the previous film.
Min Tanaka joins as the biologist Kanji Murakami. Returning from Minus One are Ryūnosuke Kamiki as Koichi Shikishima, Minami Hamabe as Noriko Ōishi, Hidetaka Yoshioka as Noda, Yūki Yamada as Shiro Mizushima, Kuranosuke Sasaki as Seiji Akitsu, Sakura Andō as Sumiko Ota and Miō Tanaka as Tatsuo Hotta.
Why this number should interest anime fans
Anime films have spent the last few years proving they can open wide in the West. Infinity Castle did it at a scale nobody thought possible. What Minus Zero adds is a different data point: a live-action Japanese film, in a franchise Americans already know, selling IMAX screens on the strength of premium formats rather than a dubbed nostalgia push.
That is the same audience theatrical anime has been courting since 2023, and it is buying the same tickets. When a Japanese film clears US$31 million in three days, the argument that these releases belong in specialty theaters gets harder to make. It also raises the bar for the anime films lined up for 2027, several of which are aiming at exactly this kind of premium-format opening.
For scale on the previous film: Godzilla Minus One earned more than US$116 million worldwide, with about US$57.1 million of that from the United States according to Box Office Mojo. Minus Zero is already past the halfway mark on that domestic figure after three days.
Two other Japanese releases show how wide the spread is right now: the Street Fighter live-action film opened at No. 1 with US$51.1 million worldwide, while GKIDS is handling home video for the 100 Meters anime film on a much smaller scale.
Source: Anime News Network
Featured image: Key visual for Godzilla Minus Zero, via Anime News Network.
