“I have transitioned into a new animal.”

No, not radiation. Not the struggles of war and the agonies of constant trauma, transforming into a rampaging, city-stomping beast. Because that would be the trailer for a Godzilla movie, and those words are spoken by Beyoncé Knowles in the advert for her concert movie Renaissance. And both of them are fighting for space on IMAX screens.

Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One is a stark reboot of the monster franchise, playing upon the idea that Japan in 1945 has already been reduced to “zero”, and that an attack by an unstoppable beast just makes everything so bad that we go into negative numbers. But whereas Minus One hit many cinemas outside Japan at the beginning of December, its UK release waited a critical couple of weeks, in a business decision that might end up benefiting absolutely everybody.

The UK has 52 IMAX screens, while Ireland has another two, with the majority of the screens being part of Cineworld/Odeon cinemas. That’s substantially less than the United States of America, where presumably Godzilla Minus One and Renaissance would be able to jostle for audience attention without wrecking the theatres.

I put the question to Anna Francis at Minus One’s UK distributor, Anime Limited, who conceded that Beyoncé’s Renaissance had already been booked into a number of IMAX screens before Godzilla began clambering out of the sea to smash stuff. But Beyoncé, she states, “was only part of the picture… the main reason was that we wanted to avoid the busier film period at the start of December.”

So, it’s not that the King of Monsters was scared of going head-to-head with Queen Bey, more like the presence of multiple distractions as the holiday season got going. Instead, Minus One got its UK release on 15th December, gaining a fortnight’s respite before yet another monster blockbuster landed in cinemas on Boxing Day: Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.

But wait a minute, Minus One dropped on 1st December not just in the USA, but also in Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Australia, New Zealand and even Belgium. Could it be that all those places were confident there was no cross-over, whereas British audiences demonstrated an equal love for both the Big G and the Big B that had to be accommodated? At least they are spared a Barbenheimer decision…

Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #237, 2024.