SFF Gazette has been chronicling the stellar box office performance of Godzilla Minus One for quite some time and as the TOHO kaiju film prepared to exit theaters in North America, we noted that the film had the chance to surpass the 1998 Italian-comedy Life Is Beautiful to take the runner-up position on the list of highest-grossing foreign-language films in North America.
Sadly, Minus One fell just short. The film will finish with $56.418M in North America, just shy of the $57.2M that Life is Beautiful earned back in 1998. Minus One had no shot at surpassing the #1 highest-grossing foreign-language film, 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon which earned $128M in North America, alone.
Still, that's not bad for a film that only planned to be in theaters for a limited run of just 1 week. Strong word of mouth and box office earnings saw that 1 week stretched to 9 weeks.
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.