Just a few days before the film exited theaters, we noted on our sister site SFF Gazette that Godzilla Minus One had the potential to surpass the 1998 Italian-comedy Life Is Beautiful and become the second-highest-grossing foreign-language film in North America.
Unfortunately, Minus One fell a little short. The kaiju pic will end its theatrical run with a final box office tally of $56.418 million in North America, just short of the $57.2 million made by Life is Beautiful in 1998. Minus One had no chance of reaching the #1 highest-grossing foreign language film, 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which grossed $128 million in North America.
However, that is still a respectable financial figure for a movie that was only supposed to play in theaters for one week.
Recently, director Takashi Yamazaki and the film's cast and crew celebrated the film's Oscar nomination. It is the first for the Godzilla franchise in the IP's history.
It secured a Best Visual Effects nomination, where it will compete against The Creator, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, and Napoleon.
Yamazaki (Lupin III: The First, Dragon Quest: Your Story) directed and wrote Godzilla Minus One. In the film Ryunosuke Kamiki portrays Koichi Shikishima, Minami Hamabe portrays Noriko Oishi, Yuki Yamada portrays Shiro Mizushima, Munetaka Aoki portrays Sosaku Tachibana, and Hidetaka Yoshioka portrays Kenji Noda.
The official synopsis for the film reads, "In the final days of World War II, a small group of Japanese soldiers encounter a dinosaur-like creature on a remote island and are massacred—leaving only two survivors. Two years later, the creature, now many times its original size and capable of shooting thermonuclear breath, appears and begins attacking ships off the coast of Japan—moving ever closer to the still-devastated, post-war Japanese mainland."
Godzilla Minus One started its limited theatrical run in North America on December 1, following special fan showings on November 29.