Godzilla Minus Zero Announces a Kaiju-Sized Premiere at New York Film Festival
Toho is following up Godzilla Minus One’s Oscar win with a splashy gala premiere at the New York Film Festival.
Now that he’s won Oscar gold, Godzilla is heading to the New York Film Festival. The long-running event is set to world premiere Godzilla Minus Zero as its Spotlight Gala selection on September 26, with director Takashi Yamazaki and members of the cast and crew that charmed Oscar viewers in 2024 in attendance. (No information yet on whether they’ll be wearing their Godzilla-claw shoes.)
A splashy premiere at an international film festival is new for the Godzilla series — the last Godzilla film premiered in Tokyo in October 2023 before making its way abroad. But, as we’ve covered before, Godzilla Minus One was a game-changer for the series, making the kind of money at the international box office and receiving the kind of rave reviews that make a crossover hit possible. Inverse’s Eric Francisco loved it, writing, “it is not hyperbole to say Godzilla Minus One is perhaps one of the finest movies of the kaiju genre ever put to screen since Ishiro Honda’s Gojira kicked off the franchise in 1954,” in his review. And that was before it won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Godzilla Minus Zero brings Godzilla back to New York in more ways than one.
The New York Film Festival is primarily a badgeholder event, but public tickets to the world premiere will go on sale Tuesday, September 15 at noon ET on the Film at Lincoln Center site. Pre-sale access will be available to FLC members (pre-sale dates vary by membership level) and Bronze or Gold passholders; you can also sign up for those on the FLC website. But even for those who can’t make it to New York City, the announcement has one more upside: This means that first reactions will be available at the end of September, rather than in the lead-up to the movie’s international release in early November.
Technically, this will be Godzilla’s fourth time in the city: He also stomped New York in Destroy All Monsters (1968), Godzilla (1998), and Godzilla: Final Wars (2004). He’s also briefly glimpsed approaching the city in the Godzilla Minus Zero teaser trailer — and that time change is a huge pain, so we have to assume that he’ll be grumpy from the jet lag when he arrives. So if you feel the ground shaking in New York in late September — run!
