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Chanelle Glugla
The wait to watch the record-breaking, Academy Award-winning Godzilla Minus One on demand in North America is officially over. Fans of the King of the Monsters can now stream Godzilla Minus One on Netflix, with Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color digital purchase and digital rental available across popular platforms.
Godzilla Minus One is available to stream on Netflix starting June 1, subtitled and dubbed in Japanese, English, and more languages in North America. Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color will be available to stream on Netflix later this summer.
The subtitled versions of Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color can also be purchased or rented digitally in subtitled versions starting June 1 on Amazon, Apple iTunes, Google Play, Microsoft, and FandangoNOW/VUDU, inDemand, XBOX, and Vubiquity. The films will also be offered through Dish and DirecTV for digital purchase and rental.
From Director, Screenwriter, and Visual Effects Supervisor Takashi Yamazaki, Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color stars Ryunosuke Kamiki, Minami Hamabe, Yuki Yamada, Munetaka Aoki, Hidetaka Yoshioka, Sakura Ando, and Kuranosuke Sasaki, with music by Naoki Sato.
Godzilla Minus One opened in North American theaters on December 1, 2023 nationwide after being shown in participating premium large format theaters for Early Access Fan Event Screenings on November 29. Its black and white version, Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color, released in North America on January 26, 2024, running for one week only through February 1, 2024.
Before arriving on digital platforms, Godzilla Minus One helped celebrate the 70th anniversary of Godzilla by becoming a global critical success with a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, and commercial success as it became the highest grossing Japanese live-action film in US Box Office History as well as the #3 top grossing Foreign Film in US Box Office History.
In March, Godzilla Minus One became the first ever Japanese film to be nominated for, and win, the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, with its recipients including Director, Writer, and Visual Effects Supervisor, Takashi Yamazaki, Visual Effects Director Kiyoko Shibuya, 3D CG Director Masaki Takahashi, and Effects Artist & Compositor Tatsuji Nojima.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about Netflix's announced plan to end its DVD rental business. After 25 years, the last day the red envelopes will be mailed out is Sept. 29. Returns will be accepted through Oct. 27.
If you're a Netflix member, you'll soon be getting an email from the company about your viewing history. I received it recently, and it said that the company "anticipated that our members would appreciate a way to download their DVD Netflix history. This personalized PDF contains your queue, rental history, ratings and reviews."
The list can be easily downloaded from Netflix by just a click on the email's box, and titles are arranged by dates shipped. Movies that have been rated by the user are listed separated by the number of stars given. I only rated about 25% of mine.
"We estimate the likelihood that you will watch a particular title in our catalog based on a number of factors," a Netflix spokesman said. "It's based on one's viewing history and ratings, information on titles including categories, actors and release year, and how long you watched."
If you haven't gotten the email yet, you can review your DVD history by logging on to your account at the Netflix DVD site (www.dvd.com). Click on the profile icon, and then on "account." Scroll down and click on "DVD Rental Activity."
Videoport, of Portland, Maine, lasted longer than most. It was better than most. It owed its longevity to a single, engaged owner, to strong ties to the local film scene and a collection that put others to shame. I was proud to work there, alongside a staff that paired film knowledge and exceptional customer service skills like few other places I've known. We were a fixture in town, until we weren't.
It hasn't been so long since independent rental joints had the opposite problem. Before Videoport, I spent 10 years working at Matt & Dave's Video Venture. In retrospect, it's hard to believe that our downfall came at the hands of a buyout by a major rental chain. Suspiciously well-dressed guys with clipboards started dropping in; soon enough, we were gone, one of the estimated 30,000 video stores in America gobbled up by Blockbuster or Movie Gallery or Hollywood Video, each eager to dominate the booming VHS rental racket. If only those chains knew that within a decade, they'd be goners too.
I spent 25 years of my life in an industry that no longer exists. Maybe I'm not the most ambitious guy. But that time has provided me with an up-close look at not just how the industry is changing but how people's tastes, and the culture those tastes create, have changed with it.
That was flattering and sad, and ultimately all we could do was agree: Yeah, we wouldn't be there. There were tears and gifts and genuine concern (not unfounded) about what my coworkers and I would do to survive, a phenomenon both touching and illustrative of how identified we were with the role we played in their lives. A great video store is built on relationships, in some cases relationships that had gone on for years. Our customers were losing the people who'd helped shape their movie taste, who'd steered them toward things we knew they'd like and away from things they didn't know they'd hate. We were losing the people that we, in our small way, had been able to help. We were all grieving the loss.
If you think I'm overrating the power of these connections, consider this: Years ago, I helped a lovely, seemingly upstanding woman choose from several Shakespeare adaptations. The next week she returned, asking about the relative merits of zombie movies. Interesting, I thought.
She started coming in regularly. After months of recommendations and some earnest cinematic dismantling ("Like a handful of romantic comedies thrown into a blender," she said of Love, Actually), I became her go-to movie guy. A year later, I became her go-to everything guy when we got married.
This phenomenon isn't uncommon. We at the store ended up dating and/or wedding customers so consistently that it became a running joke from the boss that we were taking money out of his pocket. (Significant others got free rentals.)
Standing at the center of a video store is to watch the world change, a time lapse of people's taste. As the years pile up, some things, even popular things, simply fall out of the cultural consciousness. Videoport fastidiously stocked new releases, but the heart of our store was its permanent collection. Not just a "foreign films" header but subsections of Japanese and Hong Kong exploitation. A dedicated Criterion Collection section next to British comedy. Anime and Bollywood, documentaries, the dark, glittering jewel that was the renowned cult movies section. It took years to build that inventory: A great video store spends its entire life span building up a representation of film history shaped and curated and always there. Things left, of course, but always in response to viewers' needs and our design.
The final filter was the pull list. Every so often the list would appear, a printout of movies and shows that hadn't been rented in a long time, typically a year or more. Any titles crossed off the list were saved. Any still there at the end of the week were out.
There were different strategies for staying the execution of an underperforming title. On the earnest end were pleas for mercy: "I promise I can make it rent" was our version of, "I swear I'll feed it and clean up after it." At their most devious, staffers would simply cross titles off the list without approval, or wait until the movie had been pulled and then just put it back on the shelf.
(I was sometimes guilty of that last tactic. During one pull list session, I was complaining about the imminent execution of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, ready to launch into my reasoned argument about leaving a hole in our Robert Altman collection, when the boss smiled and said, "Well, I assume you'll just do when you usually do.")
By contrast: Netflix routinely adds and removes films at a whim based almost exclusively on licensing agreements. These agreements just don't mean that movies any respectable video store would have remain "unavailable for streaming," but that a substantial portion of Netflix's (rather small) 10,000 film inventory is garbage: direct-to-DVD movies (or movies that bypass DVD for streaming entirely) accepted as part of package deals to get the rights to titles somebody might actually want to see. Although not everything you might want to see. As of this writing, you can't watch Annie Hall, Argo, The Exorcist, This Is Spinal Tap, Taxi Driver, Schindler's List, The Muppet Movie, A Nightmare On Elm Street, Fight Club, or Frozen on Netflix. You can, however, stream Transmorphers or Atlantic Rim, two suspiciously titled low-budget knockoffs of the movie you meant to watch.
The dwindling number of employees who stayed through the ever-leaner years did our best to stem the tide. Being overeducated, underemployed movie geeks, this meant counting on the power of passionate reason to counter the flood of fleeing customers. I started a weekly blog/newsletter for the store. I intended it to be a place for customers and staff to continue the ongoing movie conversation through movie reviews, debates, and think pieces about the store and movies in general. In theory it was, apart from being a chance for me to exercise my brain and writing skills, a way to bind customers to the store by giving them a sense of ownership in the place. In practice, as the customers drifted away, it became more like a running, increasingly desperate 10-year argument as to why our video store deserved to exist, written by me.
But even in our small, art-friendly city, we were abandoned, at first slowly and then very, very quickly. By our last year, each month was down some 30 percent from the already meager takings of the previous year, and it became increasingly clear that there was simply nothing we could do to stop the slide.
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