The 10 Highest-Grossing Kaiju Movies Of All Time (Including Godzilla x Kong)

Summary

• The top 10 highest-grossing
  kaiju
  movies are all English-language productions despite the genre’s Japanese origins.
• Nevertheless, five of the entries feature the iconic Japanese monster Godzilla, including
  Godzilla vs. Kong
  and
  Godzilla: King of the Monsters
  .
• The entire Monsterverse is so far represented on the list with titles that also include 2014’s
  Godzilla
  and 2017’s
  Kong: Skull Island
  .

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The 10 highest-grossing kaiju movies of all time have accumulated more than $4 billion between them. Literally translated from Japanese, kaiju means “strange beast,” but the term has been predominately applied to movies where giant monsters wreak havoc. The roster features a new addition in 2024 after the Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire box office rose to become the highest-grossing movie in the Monsterverse as of June 2024.

Although the Top 10 are all English-language productions, the kaiju genre would not exist without the cinematic contributions of Japan. The Godzilla franchise in particular is perhaps the most iconic and influential kaiju franchise in the world, and the original 1954 movie is frequently credited with kickstarting the genre as it is currently known, though other giant monster movies such as King Kong and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms preceded it to the screen. Japan’s Godzilla Minus One and Shin Godzilla were also enormous worldwide hits in their own right, though they fell just outside the Top 10.

Other prominent and high-grossing kaiju movies such as Super 8, Cloverfield, and The Host are likewise not included due to their relative grosses, while the movies in the Jurassic Park and The Meg franchises were considered ineligible due to the fact that their central creatures are large prehistoric animals rather than “monsters” or mundane animals that have grown to enormous size.

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10 Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)

Box Office: $290.9 Million

The Pacific Rim franchise, which began with the original 2013 movie helmed by Guillermo del Toro, is greatly indebted to the kaiju genre. In fact, the giant monsters at the center of the story are called, simply, Kaiju. The giant mechs called Jaegers that are used to fight the Kaiju are more commonly found in the Japanese tokusatsu genre (noted for its heavy special effects), making this something of a mashup, though they have also been included in many kaiju movies as well.

The 2018 sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising failed to earn a profit at the box office because its roughly $175 million budget likely would have required it to gross more than $350 million just to break even. This is probably why it has so far not earned a third theatrical installment, though its $290.9 million gross is still enough to make it the tenth highest-grossing kaiju movie of all time.

9 Godzilla (1998)

Box Office: $379 Million

1998’s Godzilla was the first American production to feature the titular dinosaur-esque kaiju, though 22 movies in the franchise had already been produced in Japan by the time it was released, cementing the monster’s iconic status. Teaming blockbuster filmmaker Roland Emmerich, who was then fresh off the alien invasion disaster movie Independence Day, with an ensemble cast led by Matthew Broderick, the movie was poised for blockbuster success.

While it remains the ninth highest-grossing kaiju movie of all time and did turn a profit during its theatrical run, the movie’s worldwide gross of $379 million, not adjusted for inflation, is still widely considered a disappointment. As was the case with Pacific Rim: Uprising 20 years later, its undoing was its massive budget, as the project cost roughly $150 million to produce and an additional $80 million to market.

8 Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)

Box Office: $387.3 Million

After the theatrical misfire of 1998’s Godzilla, Hollywood wouldn’t attempt to release a new movie featuring the monster for a full decade and a half. The next time that happened was 2014’s Godzilla, which spawned the Monsterverse franchise, an interconnected universe that now includes five movies and two television shows including Kong: Skull Island, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and the 2014 movie’s first direct sequel, subtitled King of the Monsters.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters grossed $387.3 million, making it the lowest-grossing entry in the franchise. Just like Godzilla (1998) and Pacific Rim: Uprising, it seems unlikely that this particular installment made its money back, as it cost roughly $200 million to produce, which likely pushed its break-even point to $400 million without factoring in marketing costs. However, this didn’t prevent the franchise from expanding and producing more entries that handily outperformed the 2019 installment.

7 Pacific Rim (2013)

Box Office: $411 Million

The original Pacific Rim, directed by Guillermo del Toro, introduced the term “Kaiju” to a wider international audience. By combining elements of some of the filmmaker’s favorite international genres from his childhood, the movie – which stars Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, and Ron Perlman – acts as something like a blockbuster primer in kaiju and tokusatsu filmmaking.

Pacific Rim made $411 million at the worldwide box office, marking it as the seventh highest-grossing kaiju movie of all time despite underperforming in North America. In addition to being the first movie in the Top 10 that is considered a proper theatrical success, though not by a huge margin, it remains the highest-grossing movie ever directed by Guillermo del Toro, with his 2017 Best Picture winner The Shape of Water trailing significantly behind with a worldwide gross of $196 million.

6 Rampage (2018)

Box Office: $428.1 million

Of the titles on this list, Rampage is the one that perhaps seems the least like a proper kaiju movie. However, the video game adaptation starring Dwayne Johnson bears many hallmarks of the genre. This includes its central monsters, which are real-life animals that have been exposed to a pathogen which causes them to mutate into giant beasts whose titular rampage threatens the city of Chicago.

Between its production budget and marketing costs, Rampage came with a roughly $260 million price tag. However, its theatrical gross of $428.1 million marks it as the sixth highest-grossing kaiju movie ever. At the time of writing, it is also the third highest-grossing Dwayne Johnson movie that wasn’t already part of an ongoing film franchise like Jumanji or Fast & Furious, behind just San Andreas ($474 million) and Disney’s Moana ($687.2 million).

5 Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Box Office: $470.1 Million

The fourth installment in the Monsterverse, Godzilla vs. Kong, marked the first time that the franchise’s iterations of the titular titans interacted with one another since the former debuted in the 2014 Godzilla and the latter debuted in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island. Just like Pacific Rim, it embodied an “East meets West” approach to the kaiju genre, bringing together an iconic Hollywood monster with Japan’s biggest kaiju export.

Godzilla vs. Kong only grossed $470.1 million theatrically, making it the second lowest-grossing installment in the Monsterverse. However, this figure is compromised because the movie was released into a pandemic-depressed box office marketplace in early 2021, with a simultaneous day-and-date streaming release on HBO Max (now Max) during the first month of its run. With those limitations, the fact that it was able to become the eighth highest-grossing movie of the year worldwide and the fifth highest-grossing kaiju movie ever is still a major achievement.

4 Godzilla (2014)

Box Office: $529.1 Million

Godzilla (2014) is the movie that started it all for the Monsterverse. It was the first time that America had attempted to bring the titular kaiju back to the big screen since the lukewarm box office take of the 1998 movie of the same name. In the meantime, six more Japanese installments in the franchise had been released, from 1999’s Godzilla 2000: Millennium through 2004’s Godzilla: Final Wars.

Godzilla (2014) proved to be a major hit in a way that the Roland Emmerich project didn’t, eventually becoming the fourth highest-grossing kaiju movie of all time and launching a major universe that is now the 91st highest-grossing movie franchise of all time. The original movie, which featured a relatively conservative $160 million budget, went on to gross $529.1 million, also becoming the 14th highest-grossing movie of the year worldwide.

3 King Kong (2005)

Box Office: $556.9 Million

King Kong, a remake of the original 1933 classic of the same name, was Peter Jackson’s first directorial project since the conclusion of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2003. Using the state-of-the-art motion-capture technique that brought Gollum (Andy Serkis) to life in 2002’s The Two Towers and 2003’s Return of the King, Jackson reteamed with Serkis to transform the actor into the titular giant ape.

Audiences flocked to King Kong, though they didn’t make it a hit at the level of the Lord of the Rings movies, which had grosses ranging from Fellowship of the Rings‘ $884 million to Return of the King‘s $1.16 billion. Nevertheless, it grossed two and a half times its record-breaking $207 million budget, making it the third highest-grossing kaiju movie ever at the time of writing, even without adjusting for inflation.

2 Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Box Office: $568.6 Million

The first installment in the King Kong franchise since the 2005 Peter Jackson movie, the Monsterverse’s Kong: Skull Island takes place in the early 1970s and presents an alternate origin story for the titular ape. So far, Kong is the only major pre-existing American monster movie icon to be front and center in the franchise, which otherwise features iconic Japanese kaiju such as Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Rodan.

Perhaps partially because of this novelty, Kong: Skull Island became a solid hit. It grossed $568.6 million against its $185 million budget, becoming the 17th highest-grossing movie of the year, ahead of the competing CGI-heavy ape movie War for the Planet of the Apes, which came in at No. 20 with $490.7 million. The 2017 movie remained the highest-grossing installment in the Monsterverse for seven years until it was recently surpassed by Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

1 Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

Box Office: $570 Million

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is the fifth theatrical installment in the Monsterverse and a direct sequel to Godzilla vs. Kong. The movie became a theatrical success in spite of the danger of the franchise oversaturating the market in early 2024, as it premiered just two and a half months after the season 1 finale of Apple TV+’s Monsterverse show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

Considering the fact that every Monsterverse movie is represented in the Top 10, it’s perhaps no surprise that Godzilla x Kong is the king of the highest-grossing kaiju movies. Its gross could continue to climb higher than $570 million, though at the time of writing its theatrical run is nearing its end. As it stands, it is the biggest hit of the franchise and of the genre in addition to boasting a slightly tighter budget of roughly $150 million that has likely allowed it to be even more profitable than Kong: Skull Island despite their grosses still being largely comparable.

Source: https://www.kidsland.edu.vn
Category: Entertainment