Godzilla Minus Zero, Wild Horse Nine and a new Cat in the Hat open

Feature presentations

Three tickets, three very different nights out

What each film is, who made it and what critics are saying, in our words and attributed to them. We have not seen these films; every judgment below belongs to a named critic or an aggregate score.

ADMIT ONE · SCREEN 1

Godzilla Minus Zero

Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki · Toho · Rated R · in IMAX in North America

Yamazaki returns two years after Godzilla Minus One, the 2023 film that won the franchise its first Oscar, for visual effects. The sequel is set in 1949 and picks up the Shikishima family's story, with Ryunosuke Kamiki and Minami Hamabe back in the lead roles. Yamazaki again supervised the effects. It was shot from August to December 2025 in Japan, New Zealand and Norway, and Wikipedia's production notes call it the first Japanese production filmed for IMAX.

It opened in Japan on Tuesday, Nov. 3, Godzilla's birthday, taking about $5.7 million on its first day, close to three times the first film's opening day, according to Gold Derby. In North America it comes from GKIDS, the Toho-owned distributor that also released Minus One.

What critics are saying

Empire (John Nugent) finds it less unified than the first film but still sees Yamazaki as one of the franchise's best keepers.
Collider (Victoria Luxford) calls it an ideal sequel that builds on the original's spectacle and feeling.
Vulture (Alison Willmore) notes the monster is slow to arrive, but says the film delivers once it does.
Screen Rant (Ben Gibbons) is the dissent: a few strong dark passages can't lift the weaker stretches.

ADMIT ONE · SCREEN 2

Wild Horse Nine

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh · Searchlight Pictures · Rated R · 118 min

A black comedy set just before Chile's 1973 coup. Two veteran CIA officers, Chris (John Malkovich) and his protégé Lee (Sam Rockwell), are sent from Santiago to Easter Island by their bureau chief (Steve Buscemi, who replaced Mark Ruffalo during casting). Old secrets strain the partnership, and Chris befriends two rebellious students, played by Mariana di Girolamo and Ailín Salas. Tom Waits and Parker Posey co-star. The story is fiction set against real history.

It was filmed on Rapa Nui and in Santiago in spring 2025, premiered in competition at Venice on Sept. 3, 2026, where Malkovich won the Volpi Cup for best actor, and had its North American premiere at Telluride.

What critics are saying

Chicago Tribune (Katie Walsh, a perfect 100 on Metacritic) calls Malkovich "as funny as he is devastating."
The Hollywood Reporter (David Rooney) singles out Malkovich's performance as the film's big surprise.
IndieWire (David Ehrlich, B-) and The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw, 3 of 5) are cooler; Ehrlich calls it prickly but not fully convincing.
The New Yorker (Justin Chang) is the clear dissent, objecting to how the film looks at Chile from the outside.

ADMIT ONE · SCREEN 3 · ALL AGES

The Cat in the Hat

Directed by Alessandro Carloni and Erica Rivinoja · Warner Bros. Pictures Animation with Dr. Seuss Enterprises · Rated PG · 107 min

An animated take on the 1957 book, with Bill Hader voicing the Cat. Here he is on his last chance to keep his job at an agency called the I.I.I.I., assigned to cheer up siblings Gabby (Xochitl Gomez) and Sebastian (Tiago Martinez), who are struggling after a move. Matt Berry voices Waffles, the fish; Quinta Brunson, Giancarlo Esposito, America Ferrera and Bowen Yang are also in the cast. DNEG did the animation.

The film has been a long time coming: Warner Bros. took the rights in 2018, and the release moved from early 2026 to this weekend in August 2025.

What critics are saying

Deadline (Pete Hammond) and The Film Verdict (Alonso Duralde) liked it, praising the music and the book's warm, anarchic spirit.
The Hollywood Reporter (Frank Scheck) sees a step up from the 2003 live-action film, but more tiring than fun.
Variety (Owen Gleiberman) thinks Hader's Cat works while the film strains to make him a mascot.
TheWrap and the Associated Press were harsher, with TheWrap's critic calling it a corporate cash-in.

Rearrange the letterboard

All eight new releases, sorted your way

Pick a measure and the marquee re-sorts. Films without a score or a published forecast drop to the bottom.

Tomatometer is the share of positive reviews; Metascore is a weighted average of critics' grades, out of 100. Forecast bars show Gold Derby's projected range in millions of dollars; the solid part runs to the low end. The Cat in the Hat had no official Tomatometer when we checked (its early reviews were split evenly). Nuisance Bear opens only in Los Angeles this weekend; Being Heumann is in select theaters before streaming on Apple TV on Nov. 13.

Last weekend · Oct. 30–Nov. 1

Halloween's quiet box office

Halloween fell on a Saturday, and it is usually one of the slowest weekends of the year at theaters. A24's You Can See Everything held on to first place in its third weekend with $11.4 million, just ahead of Warner Bros.' Clayface, which fell 54% in its second weekend.

The biggest jump in the top ten belonged to Sony Pictures Classics' The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, up more than twelvefold as it expanded to 1,112 theaters. A live concert screening from BTS's world tour took sixth, and Sony's Resident Evil passed $157 million in its seventh weekend.

This weekend, You Can See Everything is forecast to slip to third or fourth with $8M–$10M, per Gold Derby.

Domestic weekend, actuals
#	Film	Weekend	Change	Total
1	You Can See Everything	$11.45M	−39%	$64.7M
2	Clayface	$11.00M	−54%	$44.7M
3	Wildwood	$8.92M	−27%	$27.3M
4	Wicker	$4.36M	−24%	$13.5M
5	Street Fighter	$3.66M	−57%	$53.5M
6	BTS World Tour 'Arirang' Live Viewing	$2.80M	new	$2.8M
7	Other Mommy	$2.60M	−34%	$55.7M
8	Resident Evil	$2.55M	−12%	$157.4M
9	The Only Living Pickpocket in New York	$1.88M	+1,255%	$2.1M
10	Heart of the Beast	$1.66M	−32%	$65.2M

Source: The Numbers, weekend of Oct. 30, 2026.

Godzilla takes the marquee. A cat in a hat wants it back.

Three tickets, three very different nights out

Godzilla Minus Zero

What critics are saying

Wild Horse Nine

What critics are saying

The Cat in the Hat

What critics are saying

All eight new releases, sorted your way

Halloween's quiet box office

Sources