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Godzilla Minus One Earns Estimated US$11 Million in U.S. Opening Weekend

Film news website Deadline reported on Sunday that Godzilla Minus One, Takashi Yamazaki's new film in TOHO's Godzilla franchise, has earned an estimated US$11 million in its first three days in the U.S. box office. The website The Numbers puts the estimate more precisely at US$11,031,954. The film is projected to land at #3 at the U.S. box office in its opening weekend.

If the estimates hold, Godzilla Minus One would become the foreign film with the highest opening weekend so far in the United States this year, surpassing the US$10.1 million opening weekend earnings of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Swordsmith Village Arc in March.

Deadline puts Godzilla Minus One's Friday earnings at US$4.7 million, its Saturday earnings at US$3.7 million, and its Sunday earnings at US$2.58 million. The film opened in 2,308 theaters.

The film opened in U.S. theaters last Friday.

Godzilla Minus One opened in Japan on November 3, 2023 ("Godzilla Day"), which was the anniversary of the first Godzilla film's November 3, 1954 release. The new film screened at The Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) as the closing film of this year's event on November 1.

The film sold 648,600 tickets for 1,041,193,460 yen (about US$6.93 million) in its first three days in the Japanese box office. The film sold 14.7% more tickets and earned 22.8% more in its first three days than the last live-action Japanese Godzilla film, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi's Shin Godzilla, did in its first three days in 2016.

Ryunosuke Kamiki plays protagonist Kōichi Shikishima, and Minami Hamabe plays heroine Noriko Ōishi. (The two also lead the cast of NHK's ongoing weekday morning series Ranman.) Other cast members include Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Andō, and Kuranosuke Sasaki.

Sources: Deadline (Anthony D'Alessandro), The Numbers