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Godzilla Minus One Film Wins 2 Asian Film Awards

Godzilla Minus One, Takashi Yamazaki's new film in TOHO's Godzilla franchise, won two awards in the 17th Asian Film Awards on Sunday. Takashi Yamazaki, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi, and Tatsuji Nojima won the Best Visual Effects award, and Natsuko Inoue won the Best Sound award for the film.

Hamabe Minami was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress award category. Rachel Leung won the award for the Hong Kong film In Broad Daylight.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist won the Best Film award, Hirokazu Kore-eda won the Best Director award for his Monster film, and Kōji Yakusho won the Best Actor award for his performance in Wim Wenders' Japanese film Perfect Days.

Godzilla Minus One also won the Best Visual Effects award in the 96th Academy Awards on Sunday. It is the first Japanese film to win in this category, and the first Godzilla film to be nominated for an Oscar. Hayao Miyazaki's and Studio Ghibli's The Boy and the Heron also received an Academy award for Best Animated Feature Film.

Japan's Eiga Engeki Bunka Kyōkai (Film Theater Culture Association) named Godzilla Minus One producers Hisashi Usui, the late Shuji Abe, Kenji Yamada, Kazuaki Kishida, Gō Abe, and Keiichirō Moriya winners of the general award at the 43rd annual Fujimoto Awards.

The film opened in Japan on November 3, 2023 ("Godzilla Day"), which was the anniversary of the first Godzilla film's November 3, 1954 release. The new film screened at The Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) as the closing film of last year's event on November 1.

The film sold 648,600 tickets for 1,041,193,460 yen (about US$6.93 million) in its first three days in the Japanese box office. The film sold 14.7% more tickets and earned 22.8% more in its first three days than the last live-action Japanese Godzilla film, Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi's Shin Godzilla, did in its first three days in 2016. The film has earned over 6.01 billion yen (about US$39.9 million) and sold 3.92 million tickets as of March 3, its 122nd day of screening in Japan. According to Kōgyō Tsūshinsha, the film is now the #1 live-action film released in Japan in 2023 (this includes all live-action films that opened in Japan in 2023, but still earned revenue in 2024).

The film has earned an estimated US$56,418,793 in the United States and US$50,303,815 internationally, as of February 1. The film has now become the third highest-grossing foreign-language film of all time in the United States.

Sources: 17th Asian Film Awards' website, The Hollywood Reporter (Patrick Brzeski)