Godzilla Minus Zero

Toho released 'Godzilla' on 3 November 1954, and the date has been Godzilla Day in Japan ever since. That is where the studio put 'Godzilla Minus Zero', which reaches British and Irish cinemas three days later, on 6 November, through Anime Limited. Takashi Yamazaki is doing the same three jobs he did on 'Godzilla Minus One': writing it, directing it and supervising visual effects that won him an Oscar in 2024 on a budget under $15 million.

It starts in 1949, two years after what happened in Ginza. Kōichi Shikishima (Ryûnosuke Kamiki), the former kamikaze pilot, is living with Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and with Akiko, the girl the two of them raised without her being theirs, in a country still rebuilding its cities. That quiet lasts about as long as quiet usually lasts in a Godzilla film.

Word comes in from Matsumoto: something shaped like a dragon is tearing the city apart and spitting lightning, and the army works out soon enough that its weapons do nothing to it. Eventually the creature gets a name, King Ghidorah, and by then Godzilla is back. Among the people trying to make sense of it are a biologist who survived Hiroshima, Kanji Murakami (Min Tanaka), a meteorologist, Makoto Aoyama (Masami Nagasawa), and Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), who now runs the disaster response bureau.

It was shot entirely in Japan between August and December 2025, with the crowd-scene extras recruited in Ibaraki, and it is the first Japanese production filmed for IMAX. Shirogumi handled the effects again, the house Yamazaki works out of, and Naoki Satō wrote the score. Sakura Ando of 'Shoplifters', Kuranosuke Sasaki and Munetaka Aoki are all back from the last one, and Jun Kunimura, the shaman in 'The Wailing', joins as a medical officer. Toho has not put a figure on the budget beyond saying it is bigger than before.

The Japanese opening was the biggest single day the series has had, around 590,000 tickets on Godzilla Day itself by early estimates. 'Godzilla Minus One' finished on $114 million worldwide and became Anime Limited's biggest release here, taking more than £2.6 million in Britain and Ireland. Critics have come down on its side: over 90% positive on Rotten Tomatoes and an average of 79 out of 100 across the 34 outlets collected on Movienco. The BBFC filed it under 'strong injury detail', and the American rating is an R, where the last one got away with a PG-13.

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