Godzilla Minus Zero Sets Record for a Foreign-Language Live-Action US Opening

A Japanese monster film with no television advertising has just out-opened every live-action foreign-language movie in North American history. Godzilla Minus Zero took $31.6 million from 3,254 theatres over the weekend of 6 to 8 November, according to Variety. The old record belonged to the Chinese martial-arts epic Hero, which opened to $17.8 million in 2002.

It also went to number one worldwide. Deadline puts the global opening at $63 million, ahead of Ramayana: Rise of a Legend at $55.7 million. Japan’s running total since Tuesday is about $17 million, or 2.7 billion yen.

Chart: GoodBad. Data from Variety and Deadline, 8 November 2026. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is an anime and holds the overall foreign-language record.

How it got there

The film is a sequel set two years after Godzilla Minus One, the 2023 hit. That film opened to $11.4 million, grew to $57 million in North America and $113 million worldwide, and won an Oscar for visual effects. Takashi Yamazaki directs again. This time Godzilla regenerates and faces a new monster in postwar Japan.

Audiences and critics liked it. Variety reports a 90 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and an A on CinemaScore, the exit poll that grades opening-night audiences. Deadline adds that the PostTrak exit survey found 95 percent of viewers positive, with 85 percent saying they would definitely recommend it.

The numbers behind the opening are unusual in one respect: screens. Premium large formats, including Dolby and Imax, accounted for 74 percent of ticket sales, Variety says. Imax alone took $12.7 million, or 40 percent of the domestic gross, and this is the first Japanese production filmed for Imax cameras. Deadline calls the 74 percent share a never-before-seen figure. It compares with a share of just over half for Universal’s The Odyssey, which opened to $123.5 million.

A small budget for the campaign

Gkids, the US distributor, released the film in North America for Japan’s Toho. Deadline reports that marketing spend in North America was under $10 million, and that television-advertising tracker iSpot showed no TV spots bought at all. A Gkids executive said the campaign stressed the intensity of seeing the film in a theatre, and the results suggest word of mouth did much of the work.

The audience skewed young and male. Deadline’s data say 76 percent were men, with 63 percent aged 18 to 34. By ethnicity, 37 percent were white, 32 percent Hispanic or Latino, 13 percent Asian American and 13 percent Black. The film played evenly across the country, with the West taking a third of the gross against about a quarter for the average film on release. Deadline also reports that the best single theatre was the AMC Lincoln Center in New York, with $170,000 through Saturday.

What the signals said beforehand

Pre-release numbers did not point to a record. Deadline cites the tracker RelishMix, which put the film’s social media reach before opening at 170 million, 29 percent below the norm for creature features. What moved was the conversation. The tracker’s word-of-mouth index rose from 6.8 on 5 October to 7.4 by 2 November. Deadline links the rise to goodwill from the first film and the franchise’s reputation for doing a lot on a modest budget. Fans quoted in the tracker’s summary compared the Toho films favourably with big-budget superhero sequels, and several said the first film was enough to sell them the sequel. That is anecdote, not measurement, but it fits the pattern of an audience arriving on trust rather than on advertising.

Deadline’s Saturday estimate had the opening at about $32 million, and the final weekend total of $31.6 million landed close to it, so the record is not an estimate that might shrink.

How it compares

The record needs context. It covers live-action films only. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, an anime from Sony and Crunchyroll, holds the overall foreign-language opening record at $70.6 million, according to Deadline. That makes Godzilla Minus Zero the largest start for a live-action film in a foreign language, but not the biggest for any film in one.

The weekend’s other new release, Warner Bros.’ animated The Cat in the Hat, opened to about $20 million from more than 4,000 locations. Variety called that a weak start for a film with a $92 million budget. Deadline was kinder, noting the film’s A CinemaScore and a production cost it puts under $90 million. The comparison shows how far a smaller, well-reviewed film can go against a famous brand. David A. Gross, who publishes the FranchiseRe box office newsletter, told Variety that Godzilla is a hit and that the weekend takes the Japanese production to a new level.

What to watch

The first question is staying power. Premium-format screens carried most of the opening, so the film’s second weekend will show whether ordinary screens can hold the audience too. The second is the global total, which Deadline put at $63 million after three days. The third is awards: the first film won an Oscar for visual effects, though no source this weekend says anything about this one’s chances.

For now, the figures are clear. A film with a campaign of under $10 million sold more tickets in its first three days than any live-action foreign-language release before it.