With $42 million domestic and $35 million international heading into New Year’s Eve weekend, Toho Studio’s spectacular Godzilla Minus One will stomp it’s way past $80 million worldwide and set a new record as the all-time highest-grossing Godzilla movie from Japan.

Already a massive hit off its $15 million (or lower) budget, Godzilla Minus One has earned rave reviews — including my own, which you can read here — and is a top Oscar contender for visual effects.

Originally intended as a limited and short release stateside, the Godzilla franchise reboot had its screen count and weeks in release extended significantly as it overperformed on opening weekend and then climbed to the top of domestic box office charts in its first weekdays in release.

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Last weekend — it’s fourth in release — Godzilla Minus One was still in the top 10 grossing films in North America at $2.6 million. The film was the fourth-highest grossing holdover of the weekend, behind only Wonka (which took $18 million), The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (at $3 million), and The Boy and the Heron ($2.7 million).

For the final weekend of 2023, Wonka looks to take about $25 million, while Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom continues to sink with $17-20 million. Both are Warner Bros. Discovery
WBD
releases, and the studio’s The Color Purple is in a tight race for third place with Universal and Illumination’s Migration, both at $15+ million grosses.

Whether WBD can secure the three top spots or not remains to be seen, but it’s all still enough to generate plenty of entertainment media buzz about the studio having a good end to the year and helping “rescue” the holiday season.

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As I explained before, that’s a narrative helping cover the fact WBD actually faced a terrible year overall, and the celebrations are more about 2023 making up some of the ground lost during the first three years of the Covid pandemic, as opposed to any suggestion this was actually a “good” year for theatrical. Box office is still down from 2019 and remains slow to recover.

Godzilla Minus One has been among the few bright spots at the box office this year, and especially during the last quarter. The film is already the biggest Japanese live-action U.S. release in history, and even set a record for this year’s best second-weekend hold for a wide release.

Having now become the highest-grossing Godzilla film from Japan in cinema history, Godzilla Minus One topped its predecessor Shin Godzilla’s $78 million cume from 2016.

How much higher Godzilla Minus One can climb remains to be seen, but it’s already grossed more than the $75 million range I expected as its higher-end outcome. While it doesn’t seem to have enough momentum to carry it toward $100 million, it doesn’t need to hit that milestone to be an enormous success for Toho, after so much acclaim and record-shattering performance.

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The Hollywood-licensed version of Godzilla returns next year in Legendary’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, continuing the MonsterVerse that started with 2014’s Godzilla, continued in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island and 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and most recently saw Godzilla vs. Kong in 2021 (and which has probably its best iteration so far in the AppleTV+ streaming series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters).

The first two films in the MonsterVerse generated $525 million and $568 million, respectively. The third film saw a drop to $387 million, but then the series climbed back to $470 million territory. So with $1.95 billion in franchise global gross to date, the Hollywood Godzilla series has been a blockbuster success for sure.

With a perspective mirroring the more anti-hero/heroic characterization of the giant atomic lizard from Toho’s past films, and with far more outrageous fantasy and sci-fi elements — a plethora of other Titans, a “hollow Earth,” and plenty of pseudo-science including gigantic weapons wielded by the Titans — these Hollywood Godzilla films are great fun and do justice to that extended era of Godzilla’s legacy.

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However, I personally always prefer the approach taken in the original 1954 Godzilla, and which Toho returned to with both Shin Godzilla and now Godzilla Minus One. I feel the emotional subtext and metaphors work best in that approach, and put the focus on Japan’s culture and traditions, as well as on what Godzilla has most meant and represented for the nation that created him.

With climate change, global warfare, political upheaval, pandemics, and the emergence of advanced technologies leaving us all feeling a bit uneasy and fearful, Godzilla Minus One speaks loudly to our anxieties about the increasing uncertainty in our world. This relevance and deeper, complex approach, combined with brilliant filmmaking, are what make this film among the very best movies of 2023, in my rankings for the year.