'Godzilla Minus One' is a different kind of blockbuster. Should Hollywood take notes?
Plus: It's a great time to be a Godzilla fan — and of Japanese pop culture in general.
70 years after his debut, Godzilla is still making waves.
The latest Japanese-produced film starring the giant kaiju opened in US theaters three weekends ago with over $11 million; then it dipped only 25% with $8.6 million in its second weekend and 48% in its third with $4.8 million, per Comscore, for a total of over $34 million in the states since it debuted (globally, it’s earned $64 million). It’s an impressive feat suggesting that the movie’s strong word of mouth could carry it into the New Year among American audiences — it has a 98% Rotten Tomatoes score and received an A grade from CinemaScore, which surveys audiences on a movie’s opening night.
By Hollywood standards, $34 million for a franchise spectacle isn’t impressive — but this is not a Hollywood movie. And what has made just as much, if not more, buzz than the movie’s reception has been that it reportedly cost a measly $15 million, a fraction of the gigantic budgets of most Hollywood tentpoles. Looking at social media, much has been said of how “Minus One” looks so much better than the likes of Marvel movies, which typically cost over $200 million to produce.
The comparison was particularly easy to make in the wake of “The Marvels” crashing at the box office, and I’ll admit I found myself thinking the same exact thing. I have been at best perplexed by, and at worse pessimistic about, the state of Hollywood franchise filmmaking this year, after a string of big-budget box-office disappointments that for the most part looked like trash. Then comes “Godzilla Minus One,” a well-made, emotionally-resonant blockbuster that looks superb on the big screen (Disclaimer: I’ve been a Godzilla fan since I was a kid. I’m talking all the old movies on VHS. “Minus One” is my favorite movie of the year, not just as a fan, but because it’s just an exceptionally well-crafted movie in its own right).
But as this Confider piece points out, production costs might be lower in other parts of the world because wages are so much lower. I don’t know enough about that to get into it, but it’s probably safe to assume that the “Minus One” and “Marvels” comparison isn’t completely fair. However, there is still a lesson to be learned for Hollywood this year: it could be making much better movies at much lower costs.
“The Creator,” this year’s sci-fi movie from director Gareth Edwards about a war between AI machines and humanity, is a better north star for Hollywood to aspire to. It cost $80 million, still a fraction of what some of the year’s most expensive movies cost to make, and a more realistic goal than, say, $15 million. It has lots of digital effects, real locations, and big stars like John David Washington, but still managed to look great. The movie didn’t perform well, grossing $104 million worldwide, but that shouldn’t deter Hollywood. David Ehrlich at Indiewire said it best in his review:
Say goodbye to $300 million superhero movies that have been green-screened within an inch of their lives and need to gross the GDP of Grenada just to break even, and say hello — fingers crossed — to a new age of sensibly budgeted multiplex fare that looks worlds better than most of the stuff we’ve been subjected to over the last 20 years while simultaneously freeing studios to spend money on the smaller features that used to keep them afloat.
Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but this really does seem like a year that we witnessed audience interests shift in real time, and studio executives are probably looking at the box office wondering how they can make movies people want to see at more reasonable budgets. Huge tentpoles that cost hundreds of millions of dollars — from the latest “Transformers” movie to even Marvel installments — failed to generate significant enthusiasm. To be fair, some budgets were inflated because of the pandemic. But “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — which aren’t part of long-running franchises and cost a combined $250 million to produce, less than the new “Indiana Jones” movie — are among the highest-grossing films of the year.
A few years ago, Hollywood could justify the high costs, especially when the movies were tearing up the box office. But after a pandemic and double-strike, the movie industry has shifted in a way we still haven’t seen the effects of. Maybe “Godzilla Minus One” isn’t the answer — but it’s fair to expect something in between that and “The Dial of Destiny” in the future.
RELATED: It’s a great time to be a Godzilla (and Japanese entertainment) fan
“Minus One” isn’t the only piece of Godzilla content fans can consume right now. “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” is a fun sci-fi thriller/mystery on Apple TV+, that follows the rise of the titular organization tasked with tracking the giant monsters of the world, which it calls “Titans.” It’s set in the universe of the Hollywood studio Legendary’s MonsterVerse that also includes movies like “Godzilla” (2014), “Kong: Skull Island” (2017), “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” (2019), and “Godzilla vs. Kong” (2021). It’s a shared universe where each installment manages to have its own look and feel, and “Monarch” is no exception, utilizing the power of the TV medium to tell a conspiracy mystery across timelines and generations; Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt play the same character, decades apart.
While the MonsterVerse is American, it has at least introduced more people to the wonders of the Godzilla franchise, and hopefully recruited new fans that want to seek out the classic Japanese films I grew up with. If you’re one of those people, I recommend, obviously, starting with the 1954 original; any movie where Mothra is a supporting player; and “Destroy All Monsters,” which lives up to its title and features pretty much every monster character you should know.
But Godzilla isn’t the only Japanese piece of pop culture making waves around the world this year. Nintendo’s “Super Mario Bros. Movie” earned over $1 billion globally this year, the most of any movie behind only “Barbie.” The gaming giant has historically been extremely protective of its IP, but after “Mario’s” success, it now has plans for a live-action Zelda movie. Japanese animation company Studio Ghibli’s “The Boy and the Heron,” the first film from animation legend Hayao Miyazaki in a decade, topped the US box office when it arrived recently — the first time an original anime film has done so.
As Bloomberg’s Screentime newsletter recently noted, more Japanese entertainment companies — like Toho, the one behind the Godzilla franchise, and Kadokawa — are making an effort to expand outside of their region, primarily in the US. And it’s easier than ever with streaming powerhouses like Netflix and the anime-centric Crunchyroll.
Beyond the Traverse
Speaking of: Marvel Studios quickly announced that they were dropping Jonathan Majors as Kang after he was found guilty of assault and harassment (An aside: I thought after Destin Daniel Cretton left the movie that Marvel should scrap “The Kang Dynasty” and skip right to “Secret Wars,” and now I’m even more firm in that belief. Just get this Multiverse Saga over with)