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How does a filmmaker attempt to follow up a history-making movie with an even bigger and better sequel? For Godzilla Minus One and Zero writer, director, and VFX supervisor Takashi Yamazaki, that line of thinking doesn’t even belong in the equation.
“In the beginning I thought, ‘Well, how do I outdo its predecessor and how do we make a movie that's going to win all these awards and it's going to be bigger in scale?’” Yamazaki told IGN during an interview near Godzilla Minus Zero’s debut at the New York Film Festival. “But I think it's very dangerous to create a movie with that type of mindset because you're going to risk diluting what makes the movie great in the first place. So those are the wrong reasons to make a movie and it ends up becoming an antagonist in your moviemaking process.”
Godzilla Minus One was released in 2023 and quickly caught fire. Yamazaki’s take on a post-WWII Godzilla was especially praised for its human-focused story and highly impressive VFX, done with a famously lean team of 35 artists. It went on to beat Hideaki Anno’s 2016 Shin Godzilla at the box office, becoming the highest-grossing Godzilla movie to date. At the 2024 Oscars, where the cast and crew walked the red carpet holding Godzilla figurines and wearing very cool Godzilla shoes, the film took home the trophy for Best Visual Effects.
The win was historic on many levels: It was the first Japanese film to claim the award, minted the first Gen Z winner in the category, and did so with the smallest budget of any other category in more than a decade. (Reports had put the cost between $10–15 million.)
“Godzilla Minus One was loved and so well received by so many around the world and received a lot of awards, which I think was unthinkable when we first set out and went to make it,” Yamazaki said. “So thinking about a sequel, of course, there's gonna be a certain amount of pressure.”
Godzilla Minus Zero is due out in the U.S. this week — it opened in Japan on November 3 for Godzilla Day — and the anticipation is high following its film festival premieres this fall that have been universally rapturous. Naturally, it’s a bigger film in just about every way. First and foremost, it’s got an extra kaiju (which means, a new pair of shoes to go with it). It’s both the first R-rated Godzilla movie and the first Japanese film to be specifically shot for IMAX screens.
At a panel at New York Comic-Con, the aforementioned Gen Z Oscar winner, VFX artist and compositor Tatsuji Nojima, gave an example of just how much more intensive the effects process becomes with that extra screen space: The shot of Godzilla leaping out of the ocean behind a seaplane from the first trailer was made entirely using VFX that required rendering 2 billion particles, versus the 200 million particles needed for an ocean sequence in Godzilla Minus One. (Nojima also shared that the scene was made by just two people: himself and an animator.) Though the exact figures are unknown, Yamazaki has confirmed that the budget was certainly bigger this time around. It’s projected to rake in $25–35 million its opening weekend, according to Box Office Pro, which would more than double Godzilla Minus One’s first weekend earnings of $11.4 million.
Still, for Yamazaki, the important part of making a successful sequel was in rejecting the anxiety of feeling like he needed to one-up Godzilla Minus One at all.
“I think when I decided not to think about it was a huge sense of relief for me and just simply focus on making a movie entertaining, making something fun, making something that has a message,” he said. “The moment where I felt like, yes, I did it was probably when I shed off all that extra pressure and thought, ‘You know what? I'm just going to make a fun movie.’ [That] was my own tipping point.”
Godzilla Minus Zero opens in the U.S. on Friday, November 6. We said it “ups the ante on the carnage, providing plenty of satisfying and visually amazing scenes of giant-monster destruction” in our review.
Photo credit: Jerritt Clark/Getty Images
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