Godzilla Minus Zero, directed by Takashi Yamazaki and starring Ryunosuke Kamiki, took ¥910 million on its opening day, the highest first-day gross ever for a live-action film in Japan, Sports Hochi reported. The figure puts the Toho release on course to pass ¥10 billion, a mark no film in the series has reached.
The film opened on November 3. It is set two years after Godzilla Minus One, the 2023 entry that won the Academy Award for visual effects, the first in Asia to do so. That film went on to gross ¥7.65 billion.
A boyhood monster, 55 years on
Yamazaki, 62, told Sports Hochi he had wanted to film a fight between monsters. King Ghidorah, the three-headed dragon, has been his favorite since he saw a revival screening of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, directed by Ishiro Honda, in his native Matsumoto at age 7.
“It's a moment when a dream came true after about 55 years, so I'm quite tenacious, aren't I?”Takashi Yamazaki, director
He described the chance to make the film as a once-in-a-lifetime one, and said he wanted to be able to tell his elementary-school self: "This is it, this is what you wanted to see."
Hiroshima and the bomb
Yamazaki said he worked on the human drama as closely as on the monsters, building the story around Koichi Shikishima, the lead played by Kamiki, who faced Godzilla in the previous film. He said he removed the limiter and swung for the fences to keep it raw. The film includes an unflinching depiction of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, which the director tied to the nuclear question at the heart of Godzilla.
The idea grew out of a conversation with Christopher Nolan, director of Oppenheimer, the 2024 film about the physicist who led the bomb's development. Yamazaki said he told Nolan that Japan had to make an answer from the Japanese side. He worried the film might read as picking a fight with the United States, but Toho, which produced and distributes it, approved and the project went ahead.
Yamazaki called the film the culmination of his career, saying every technique he has developed is used in it, from the aerial combat of The Eternal Zero and the battleship action of The Great War of Archimedes to the Showa-era streets of Always: Sunset on Third Street. He said his drive comes from the power to dream, and that he wants to keep delivering dreams to people who hold on to the hearts of children.
Yamazaki was born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, on June 12, 1964. He joined the visual effects company Shirogumi in 1986 and made his directing debut with Juvenile in 2000. His other credits include Stand by Me Doraemon.