‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ Stomps In With $6M in Previews, Nearly Triple ‘Minus One’: The R Rating, the Reviews and What’s at Stake

Three years ago a subtitled monster movie with a budget smaller than some Marvel catering bills walked out of the Academy Awards with an Oscar. Today its sequel opens wide across North America, and the early numbers suggest nobody is treating it like a niche import anymore. Godzilla Minus Zero has reportedly banked about $6 million in U.S. previews before its first official Friday, which is nearly three times the $2.1 million its predecessor pulled from its own early shows. That kind of number used to belong to Hollywood's Godzilla, the one with the Warner Bros. logo on it.

It also arrives with something the franchise has reportedly never carried in its 72 years: an R rating. So the stakes this weekend are bigger than one box office chart. Below you'll find what's confirmed, what the critics are actually fighting about, why Takashi Yamazaki went back to the monster he shares a birth year with, and our math on what the preview figure really predicts.

Watch the Trailers

Toho's newest spot, Official Trailer 3, went up this week and gives the best look yet at King Ghidorah. Below it is the trailer cut in the IMAX 1.43:1 ratio, which is worth a look if you're still deciding what kind of screen to pay for.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

Can't see the video? Watch it on YouTube.

The Details

• Release: Japan on Nov. 3 through Toho; North America wide on Nov. 6 through GKIDS, with Cineplex Pictures handling Canada.
• Theaters: more than 3,000 in North America, according to Variety's figures as relayed by MovieWeb. Minus One opened in about 2,300.
• Rating and runtime: R for bloody images and some violent content, 2 hours 15 minutes, per Rotten Tomatoes' listing. That's 10 minutes longer than Minus One.
• Format: GKIDS bills it as the first Japanese production filmed for IMAX.
• Setting: 1949, two years after the first film. The survivors learn Godzilla was never truly destroyed, and something new has shown up too.
• Cast: Ryunosuke Kamiki returns as Koichi Shikishima and Minami Hamabe as Noriko Oishi, joined by returning players Yuki Yamada (Mizushima), Kuranosuke Sasaki (Akitsu), Munetaka Aoki (Tachibana), Hidetaka Yoshioka (Noda) and Sae Nagatani (Akiko). Masami Nagasawa and Min Tanaka are among the additions.

Photo: Minami Hamabe via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).

Who's Behind It

Yamazaki wrote, directed and supervised the effects, the same triple duty he pulled on Minus One. Genre fans may know him from the two-part Parasyte adaptation (2014 and 2015), but in Japan his name was made well before that. Always: Sunset on Third Street (2005) took 12 Japan Academy prizes, including Best Picture and Best Director, and he later co-directed the family smash Stand by Me Doraemon. Then came the 96th Academy Awards, where he and his team became the first Japanese crew to win Best Visual Effects.

His reason for choosing Ghidorah is pleasantly personal. He told Den of Geek he feels a special attachment because the creature debuted in 1964, the year he was born. He also described the dragon as a stand-in for natural disaster, specifically the typhoons Japan lives with, and said he wants his Godzilla to play as something spiritual, closer to a force of awe than a hero with a fan club. Talking to AFP at CinemaCon in April, he promised a much tighter view of the monster: "I don't think we've ever been able to get this close to Godzilla before."

Photo: Ryunosuke Kamiki and Takashi Yamazaki via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).

The Backstory

Minus One reset expectations for what a Japanese Godzilla could do overseas. It opened to $11.4 million in December 2023, finished with $57.1 million domestically and, by GKIDS' count, passed $116 million worldwide. For scale, Shin Godzilla had held the Japan-produced franchise record at $78 million for seven years. A reported budget of $10 million to $12 million (Yamazaki himself would only say under $15 million) made the Oscar win look even more absurd.

The follow-up came together fast. Filming ran through the back half of 2025, including extras work in Ibaraki from late August into September, and wrapped that December, with additional shooting reported in New Zealand and Norway. At a Tokyo event that same month, James Cameron jokingly offered his services as second-unit director if things ran behind. GKIDS, the distributor best known for animation, landed North America in January 2026. The first teaser dropped April 14, the IMAX trailer followed in September, and the film had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival later that month.

By the Numbers

• U.S. previews: roughly $6 million, reportedly a GKIDS record. Its previous best was the $2.39 million The Boy and the Heron did before a $13 million opening. Early reports differ on how that total splits between Godzilla Day fan events and regular shows.
• Projection: $30 million or more for the weekend, with one estimate range running $25 million to $35 million, and The Cat in the Hat expected around $20 million to $25 million.
• Japan: a reported 910 million yen (about $5.7 million) on opening day, said to be a live-action record that passes Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets at 840 million yen. The three-day total reached 1.38 billion yen, or about $8.7 million.
• Critics: 90% on Rotten Tomatoes from 122 reviews at last check, against 99% for Minus One. World of Reel puts Metacritic at 74, down from 81.
• Audiences: a 96% Popcornmeter from 500-plus verified ratings so far. No CinemaScore has surfaced yet. Minus One earned an A.
• Money in: Variety has reported a budget above $15 million, though World of Reel says the figure isn't firmly established, and it cites Deadline for a $10 million GKIDS marketing spend.

What This Really Means

Here's the napkin math we keep coming back to. Minus One turned $2.1 million in previews into an $11.4 million opening, a multiple of about 5.4. The Boy and the Heron did almost exactly the same thing, $2.39 million into $13 million. Run $6 million through that multiple and you land near $32.6 million, right on top of the industry projection. Godzilla: King of the Monsters , which took in $6.3 million in Thursday previews before a $47.7 million opening, implies a much rosier $45 million.

We'd bet on the lower end, and here's why. That Warner Bros. number was a straightforward Thursday figure for a four-quadrant studio release. The Minus Zero total includes event screenings aimed at the most devoted fans alive, the people who were always going to buy a ticket early. Add a subtitled film, an R rating and a 135-minute runtime that squeezes showtimes, and the front-loading risk is real. Still, even $30 million would be more than 2.5 times the last film's opening and over half of its entire domestic run in three days. On a budget reported in the mid-teens, nobody at Toho is losing sleep.

The more interesting test comes next weekend. Clayface showed how quickly goodwill can evaporate this fall: it opened strong with a rare A- CinemaScore for its genre, then fell 57% in its second frame. Minus One became a phenomenon because it held and people kept telling their friends. If the sequel's scores are softer, its legs are the thing to watch, not its Friday.

And those scores are softer in an interesting way. The reviews aren't split on spectacle; they're split on structure. Collider handed it a perfect score and Flickering Myth gave it five stars, while Empire went 3 out of 5, Screen Rant 5 out of 10, and our friends at Dread Central called it a disappointing step down, with Godzilla largely held back for the first 90 minutes. IndieWire's David Ehrlich may have found the most useful framing, calling it "very much like the middle chapter of a trilogy." If that's right, the question isn't whether it beats Minus One but whether audiences will reward a movie that's building toward something they haven't seen yet.

There's a wider win here for horror fans too. As we argued after the NC-17 cut of The Devils found paying crowds, restrictive ratings scare executives more than they scare ticket buyers. A Godzilla movie thriving with an R would be one more data point on our side.

What We Still Don't Know

• The actual weekend number. Everything above is previews and projections until the Sunday estimates land.
• The CinemaScore, which will say a lot about whether the slower build plays with general audiences.
• Whether it tops the chart, which would reportedly make it the first foreign-language film to do so since Chainsaw Man.
• How Yamazaki follows this up. Nothing we've seen confirms a third film, whatever that "middle chapter" feeling suggests.

Bottom Line

A Japanese-language, R-rated kaiju movie out of an animation-focused distributor is fighting for No. 1 against a Dr. Seuss adaptation, and it might win. Even if the critics are right that it can't match the near-perfect first chapter, that's a sentence nobody would have believed in 2022. Are you seeing it this weekend, and does the idea of an R-rated Godzilla get you more excited or more nervous?

Related on The Horror Feed

• ‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Season 3 in the Works at Apple TV
• ‘Clayface’ Drops 57%: What Its Halloween Weekend Really Means
• Opinion: ‘The Devils’ Just Proved NC-17 Isn’t Poison

Header photo: Takashi Yamazaki at the 2023 Tokyo International Film Festival via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.

Sources: GKIDS, Rotten Tomatoes, SuperHeroHype via Yahoo, World of Reel, MovieWeb, Cosmic Book News, Den of Geek, AFP via ARY News, Dread Central, Wikipedia.