Godzilla Minus Zero Opens at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes After Its Festival Debut

The king is back, and the scoreboard noticed. Godzilla Minus Zero, Takashi Yamazaki’s sequel to the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, has climbed to 97% on Rotten Tomatoes after its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. Coverage this week put the Tomatometer at 97% from a little over 30 reviews. Earlier counts sat in the low-to-mid 90s as the first notices landed. That is the nature of a pre-release score: it moves. Right now it is sitting one notch under Minus One, which still holds 99%, and ahead of the 1954 original on the same site if the number holds. Toho opens the film in North American theaters and IMAX on November 6. Australia is listed a day earlier in some schedules. The running time in the listing is 2 hours 15 minutes. The MPA rating is R — the first time this Japanese cycle has taken that mark for the action. Audience scores are not up yet. They usually are not, until tickets are on sale in volume. A 97% this far out is not a guarantee of the November number. It is a signal that the festival room did not flinch. What the Critics Are Actually Saying The consensus forming in the early reviews is scale without abandoning the people. Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it an even grander clash, with Godzilla and King Ghidorah in a fight to the death and Yamazaki’s “monster action paintings in motion” intact. The Hollywood Reporter credited the director with keeping the human drama as compelling as the face-offs. Total Film put devastating drama next to earth-shaking kaiju action and called it one of the best films of the year. Screen International went with “devastating and heartbreaking.” Polygon said the follow-up trades some of the last film’s ingenuity for grander spectacle and a harder look at the fallout of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not everyone is at the ceiling. RogerEbert.com gave it three out of four and said it does not reach the miraculous highs of the predecessor, “but the old boy still has plenty of bite.” TheWrap called it a great Godzilla sequel, maybe one of the best, and not one of the great Godzilla movies. A minority of notices are cooler on the melodrama and on how long the film waits to unleash the monsters. One early rotten score argued the thunder is too rare. That is a real split, not a pile-on. It is also why 97% can slip to the low 90s without the movie having “collapsed.” Metacritic is the soberer board. About 16 reviews there were sitting at 77 — generally favorable, mostly positive, a couple mixed, none negative in that first batch. Festival scores often gap like that. Rotten Tomatoes counts fresh versus rotten. Metacritic averages the number. Both can be honest. What the Film Is Minus Zero picks up in 1949, two years after Minus One. War had already reduced Japan to zero; Godzilla pushed it into minus. The Shikishima family — Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe back in the leads — has clawed toward an ordinary life. A new calamity ends that. The tagline in circulation is blunt: there is no third time. Everything ends here. King Ghidorah, the three-headed dragon who first appeared in the 1964 Toho film, is the other giant. Yamazaki writes and directs again. The supporting cast returns in force: Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, Kuranosuke Sasaki. It is billed as the first Japanese feature shot for IMAX. The effects conversation is the one Minus One already won: that film took the visual-effects Oscar and embarrassed a run of far more expensive Hollywood spectacles. Reviewers who have seen Zero say the images clear that bar again, with less reliance on volume and more on the quality of a single fight. The politics in the notices are not decorative. Several reviews tie the new calamity back to nuclear aftermath and to what survival does to people who already survived once. That was the trick of Minus One — a monster film that behaved like a postwar drama until the boat chase. Zero, by the early write-ups, doubles the monsters and keeps the drama in the frame. Why “Highest-Rated Sequel” Is a Careful Claim If 97% holds past opening week, Minus Zero would sit among the best-reviewed sequels on the Tomatometer and as the second-highest-rated Godzilla film on the site, behind only its parent. “One of the highest-rated sequels of all time” is a leaderboard claim, and leaderboards move when the review count triples. Thirty reviews is a premiere. Three hundred is a release. The direction of travel matters more than the integer this week. Minus One grossed about $116 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing Japanese Godzilla film, with a North American run that made it the highest-grossing Japanese-language movie in that market for a stretch. Zero does not have to repeat the shock. It has to not waste it. A 97% festival score is how a November IMAX booking gets a second look from people who do not usually buy kaiju tickets. What to Watch Whether the Tomatometer stays above 90 once the wide-review wave hits. The Popcornmeter after November 6. IMAX sell-through in the first weekend. Whether the effects conversation returns at awards season, or whether the R-rated scale crowds out the human story that won the last film its audience. How Ghidorah plays for viewers who only know the MonsterVerse version. Yamazaki already made the Godzilla film people who do not watch Godzilla films went to see. The early score says he did not spend the sequel apologizing for that. November will say whether the number was a festival room or a public one.