Movie Monday: ‘Godzilla x Kong’ Is a Box-Office Beast

Godzilla and Kong are not known for gently tiptoeing through quiet suburban neighborhoods. Stick ‘em both in a city, and they’ll be guaranteed to knock down skyscrapers, tear through train yards and give insurance adjusters ulcers.

So given their ability to literally destroy city blocks, perhaps it’s no surprise that Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire proved to be a blockbuster of a different sort.

Godzilla x Kong went on a cinematic rampage this weekend, clubbing and stomping its way to an estimated $80 million opening in North America. That’s the second-biggest debut we’ve seen in 2024 (trailing Dune: Part Two’s $82.5 million opening),and it marks this monster mashup as a smashing success.

Overseas, Godzilla x Kong did even better, banking $114 million in international markets. That pushes the movie’s global gross to $194 million.

Fun fact: A $100 bill is about .0043 inches thick. If you stacked $194 million worth of $100 bills on top of each other, it would be just a bit over 695 feet tall—dwarfing even the 394-foot Godzilla. Now, that’s a lot of cash.

With Godzilla x Kong in town, every other movie pretty much ran for safety.

Last week’s champ, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, barely put up a fight. It lost nearly two-thirds of its weekend-over-weekend audience and earned just $15.7 million, slipping to second place in the process. Frozen Empire has now banked $73.4 million domestically, and $108.5 million worldwide.

Dune: Part Two, already the year’s biggest film, earned another $11.1 million to finish third and pushed its domestic cinematic coffers to $252.4 million. Worldwide, Dune: Part Two has mined a whopping $626.1 million. Spicy indeed.Kung Fu Panda 4 kicked its way into fourth place with $10.2 million, while the horror flick Immaculate finished a very distant fifth with $3.3 million.