"Godzilla Minus Zero" Opens Today With Three Forecasts, a Disputed Record in Japan, and a Three-Film Club to Join

Our projection piece on Wednesday laid out the milestone: only three non-English-language films have ever opened at No. 1 in the United States. Today the candidate actually opens, and the honest summary of the forecast business is that nobody's model agrees with anybody else's — which is itself the story, because the spread tells you how unusual this release is.

Three forecasts, printed separately

TheWrap, in the tracking report our earlier piece was built on, expects $30–35 million domestically, with IMAX support. Variety, as reported in syndicated coverage of its tracking piece, puts it at about $30 million from 3,254 North American theaters. Deadline, in the same syndicated report, is the cautious end: $25–30 million in North America and roughly $60 million worldwide, across 60 territories and some 17,000 screens. Boxoffice Pro's weekend preview splits the range at $25–35 million and ranks the film No. 1 for the weekend. This desk doesn't average forecasts into a fake consensus; the four numbers above are the state of play, and Sunday's audited gross will replace all of them. One more state-of-play fact, stated plainly: as of this filing, no Thursday-preview gross for the film has been reported by any trade — previews are part of the weekend's arithmetic, and the figure will be added here when a named source publishes one.

The head start, and the asterisk on it

The film has already opened where it matters most to its makers. In Japan, on Tuesday — Godzilla Day, November 3 — it took ¥910 million ($5.7 million) on day one, from more than 590,000 admissions, which the syndicated Deadline report puts at 201% of Minus One's first day. Toho calls that a live-action opening-day record in Japan. Deadline, to its credit, printed the claim and then noted it couldn't verify it — the same report points out that Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle opened in Japan to ¥1.64 billion ($11.1M) in July 2025. So: the gross is verified; the record label is Toho's, and it's disputed in the same breath by the trade reporting it. Both halves of that sentence ship together or not at all.

What a win would mean, and what it pays

Critics, at least, have shown up: the trades report the Rotten Tomatoes score variously at 89% (Deadline, as Certified Fresh), 90% (Boxoffice Pro) and 91% (TheWrap) — a range, not a discrepancy worth laundering into one number. The commercial stakes sit with GKIDS, the film's North American distributor: Boxoffice Pro notes the film will likely become GKIDS' biggest grosser ever, ahead of The Boy and the Heron's $47.3 million, and even a mid-$20s opening would be the distributor's largest. And the milestone from Wednesday stands unchanged: finish first, and Minus Zero joins The Passion of the Christ, Hero and Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle as the fourth non-English film to open at No. 1 in America — directed, like its predecessor, by Takashi Yamazaki, and set two years after Minus One, with Godzilla regenerated and King Ghidorah waiting. The cat, across the multiplex, has problems of its own — see the companion piece below.