Godzilla Minus Zero Opened at $31.6 Million and Stepped on Bill Hader's Cat in the Hat
Toho's subtitled monster sequel set a record for a foreign-language live-action opening, while Warner Bros.' $92 million Dr. Seuss cartoon fizzled at about $20 million.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
Godzilla Minus Zero opened at No. 1 in North America this weekend with an estimated $31.6 million from about 3,250 theaters. That's the biggest opening ever for a live-action foreign-language film here, more than the old record held by Hero. A Japanese movie with subtitles beat an American cartoon with a famous cat in it. Somewhere a studio executive is staring at a whiteboard that says 'Do kids read now?'
The cartoon was The Cat in the Hat, Warner Bros.' new animated Dr. Seuss movie, with Bill Hader voicing the cat. It took in about $20 million against a reported $92 million budget. Reviews were split, sitting in the 40s on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences who went gave it an A on CinemaScore, which is the movie business's way of saying the people who showed up liked it and it would be nice if more of them had.
Now, you'd think a Dr. Seuss movie would be the safer bet. The man's books have been in every nursery in America for seventy years. But this is the second time Hollywood has tried to put this particular cat on the screen. The first, with Mike Myers in 2003, sits at about 10 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, a score so low it's mostly a warning label. Making The Cat in the Hat a second time is like going back to the barber who gave you the haircut your mother still talks about.
Godzilla, meanwhile, came in as the sequel to Godzilla Minus One, the 2023 film that won Takashi Yamazaki and his team the Oscar for visual effects on a budget Hollywood would spend on catering. Yamazaki is back as writer, director and effects supervisor, which is three jobs, and he appears to be doing all of them better than most studios do one. The new film is set in 1949, two years after the last one, and if it's anything like the last one, people will come for the monster and stay for the grief.
There's a lesson in this, and I suspect Hollywood will ignore it the way it ignores most lessons that don't come with a franchise attached. You can spend $92 million on a cat everybody knows, or you can make a movie people actually want to see. A lizard that knocks down Tokyo is fine. A lizard that knocks down Burbank is what the studios ought to be afraid of.