Allgemein

Godzilla Minus Zero Is Officially the Title of Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One Follow-Up — but What Does It Mean?

Von [email protected] Loading...

The Godzilla Minus One follow-up is called Godzilla Minus Zero. The announcement was made at Godzilla Fest with the short teaser, below. The styling GODZILLA -0.0 can be seen at the end of the teaser with the official logo.

Minus One director and writer Takashi Yamazaki, who also handled VFX, returns for Minus Zero, which is once again produced by TOHO Studios. Godzilla Minus One was a breakout hit in 2023, winning critical and commercial acclaim internationally alongside a $113 million box office haul. It won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars, with Japanese filmmaker Yamazaki held up as a shining star of the form. IGN’s Godzilla Minus One review returned an 8/10. We said: “A grand, sweeping blockbuster, Godzilla Minus One is light on terror and heavy on spectacle.”

The follow-up comes as no surprise given the success of Godzilla Minus One, which is the third-highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. box office history with $56.4 million domestically, and the highest-grossing Japanese film ever at the U.S. box office. This is all the more impressive when you consider Godzilla Minus One’s lean production budget of around $15 million.

“Our situation was unique, given how I was situated in the larger scheme of the overall production,” Yamazaki told IGN in a previous interview. “And the fact that I had a clear goal, more perhaps than other directors, because of my VFX background. There are good inefficiencies and bad inefficiencies. We focused on the approval process in different ways to streamline certain aspects of the VFX pipeline.”

There is of course plenty of speculation about what the title, Godzilla Minus Zero, means for the movie itself. There’s no official word, but it’s worth noting that Godzilla Minus One was so-called because it took place before 1954’s Godzilla. Perhaps the movie after Minus Zero will be Godzilla… Plus One? And there are plenty of fans having fun with -0.0 as a number that doesn’t really exist.

Warning! Spoilers for Godzilla Minus One’s ending below:

At the end of Godzilla: Minus One, it’s revealed that Noriko miraculously survived the rampaging kaiju’s atomic blast, which leveled Tokyo. What’s more, Noriko mysteriously survived with minimal damage, save for an obfuscated black mark on her neck. During last year’s Godzilla Fest in Osaka, Yamazaki confirmed that the black marks on Noriko’s neck were Godzilla cells or G-cells. Yamazaki’s remarks about Godzilla Minus One’s cliffhanger not only led to a roar of applause from thousands of excited Godzilla fans in attendance but also reignited months-old fan theories about what direction a potential sequel film could take.

Godzilla Minus Zero does not have a release date.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].