Look, we should probably address the elephant in the room before we talk about the giant radioactive dinosaur.

Aggressive Comix has been quiet. Embarrassingly quiet. The site has been collecting dust since 2019, aside from one lonely post last December that felt less like a comeback and more like somebody coughing in an empty convention hall. Life happens. The internet moves on. We get it.

Then Takashi Yamazaki dropped Godzilla Minus Zero, and the damn thing walked into North American theaters and set a record. So yes. Hi. Homemade for fans by fans, still, and apparently we picked the weekend a Japanese kaiju movie clobbered the box office to crawl back out of the cave.

Here are the numbers, because the numbers are kind of insane.

According to Variety’s updated weekend figures, Godzilla Minus Zero opened to $30.5 million from 3,254 theaters in North America. That’s a hair under the Sunday estimate of $31.6 million, and it is still the largest opening weekend for a live-action foreign-language film this continent has ever seen. The old record belonged to Zhang Yimou’s Hero, which debuted with $17.8 million way back in 2002. Godzilla didn’t just beat it. It lapped it.

Overseas, the movie added $31.4 million from 77 markets, good for about $62 million worldwide out of the gate. For context, Yamazaki’s 2023 predecessor, Godzilla Minus One, opened to $11.4 million here, then rode serious word of mouth to $57 million in North America and $113 million globally. It also won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, the first Godzilla movie ever to take one home. This sequel more than doubled that North American opening in a single weekend.

And people didn’t just show up. They showed up to get flattened. Variety reports this is the first Japanese production ever filmed for IMAX, and those bigger screens accounted for $12.7 million, or 40 percent of the domestic opening. Premium large formats overall — IMAX, Dolby, the whole ear-ringing buffet — made up a ridiculous 74 percent of ticket sales. This is not a movie people half-watched on the couch between snack runs. This is a movie people paid extra to have a lizard rattle their sternum.

The reviews backed it up. Godzilla Minus Zero is at 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 96 percent audience score, and it earned an A from CinemaScore. Critics coming out of the New York Film Festival premiere, and out of the wide opening, have been pretty consistent about what works: the effects somehow topped the Oscar-winning work from Minus One, the human story didn’t get thrown overboard for the spectacle, and the IMAX presentation is the entire point. There is some disagreement about whether it’s actually better than the first one. A few critics say it’s sillier, or less focused, or too light on Godzilla himself for long stretches. That’s a fair fight to have after you leave the theater. It is not a reason to skip the theater.

If you somehow missed the basics on the way in: this is a Toho movie, directed, written, and VFX-supervised by Yamazaki, and distributed in the United States by GKIDS. It opened in Japan on November 3 — Godzilla Day, 72 years after the original 1954 film first hit theaters on that same date — and in North America on November 6. Toho and GKIDS say the near-simultaneous Japan and North America rollout is a first for the Japan-produced Godzilla series. It’s R-rated, in Japanese with English subtitles, and it runs about two hours and fifteen minutes. The story picks up two years after Minus One, with Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and Noriko (Minami Hamabe) still trying to have something like a life, while Godzilla resurfaces to take on a new monster tormenting postwar Japan. That monster, according to reviews across the board, is King Ghidorah. Three heads, no manners, one of the great antagonists in this whole franchise, and by every account the clash is why you want the biggest, loudest screen you can find.

Deadline notes that Yamazaki’s team on Minus One was only about 35 visual-effects artisans, and that this sequel only added a handful more. Hollywood has spent the last few years throwing nine-figure budgets at murky CGI slop and then acting shocked when nobody remembers it on Monday. Meanwhile a Japanese production, made for a fraction of that cost, just did $30 million in a weekend and made a 24-year-old box office record look quaint. Chance Huskey, GKIDS’ VP of distribution, called it an unprecedented scale of embrace for an international film and credited a campaign that sold “the must-see intensity of the theatrical experience.” For once, the marketing wasn’t lying.

There’s a lesson in there for anybody who still gives a damn about seeing movies in a room with strangers. Spectacle works when it feels like it weighs something. Minus One worked because you cared about the people running from the lizard. Minus Zero, from the early returns, is trying to do that again, only bigger, and with Ghidorah chewing the sky. Some folks will come out saying the first one is still king. Some will say this one goes harder. Either argument is a gift. It means the movies are good enough to fight over.

So if you’ve got an IMAX screen within driving distance, this is the one. If you loved Minus One, you already bought the ticket. If you skipped it, you’ve got a pretty spectacular problem, and the nice kind: two serious Godzilla movies waiting, and a few decades of older ones when you’re done.

As for us: we’re going to be around. Comics, movies, TV, horror, anime, games, the occasional cocktail we have no business mixing. Nothing goes live until it’s actually ready, because we want this stuff to be good. The site’s been asleep long enough. A giant monster just reminded everybody what a theatrical event looks like. Felt like the right time to stop lurking.