Why A Japanese Monster Flick Is A Business Masterclass

A tenth of Tinsel Town budgets

You probably know that Godzilla Minus One was one of 2023's surprise hits. It grossed US$115m at box offices around the world, US$56m of which was taken in the States alone. Now, US$115m isn't a vast taking compared to the majority of its Hollywood peers (as you can see in the table below, Oppenheimer took more than $975m, while Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 managed a hefty $845m).

But it did manage to trade punches with higher profile mainstream productions such as Killers of the Flower Moon ($158m) and Shazam: Fury of the Gods ($134m), and ranks as one of the top grossing foreign language movies ever released in the USA.

Takings at seven times the spend

And we've yet to mention a little figure that should grab the interest of any entrepreneur worth their salt: Minus One's global box office takings were seven times its paltry US$15m production costs.

Its Japanese production company, Toho, is accustomed to turning big bucks through its anime output - Demon Slayer: Mugen Train turned over US$279m, for example. But what caused such a stir in Hollywood was the combination of Minus One's low cost, box office success and its astonishing win of the Best Visual Effects Oscar at the 2024 Academy Awards.

The latter led to months of naval gazing in Tinsel Town, with what one presumes were tense conversations between American film financiers and homegrown visual effects production companies - how did this obscure, low-budget Japanese monster flick lift an Oscar that by rights should never leave the clutches of the lavishly funded and equipped US VFX teams?

The precise VFX cost for Minus One is unknown, but there have been plenty of educated guesses - and even if they are wildly out, the total production cost is still of a magnitude below the bill for the likes of, say, Dune 2 or Inside Out 2.

The lessons for any entrepreneur

So let's repeat Minus One's achievement, and as we do so, in your mind replace the movie industry with whatever field of business you're in.

A Japanese film is made for a tenth of the money typically spent by Hollywood - the home of film - and goes on to earn seven times its initial outlay. Oh, and it walks away with one of the industry's most coveted Awards on the home soil of the nation with the funding and talent to make the Japanese achievement close to a miracle.

The question then becomes one of understanding how the director Takashi Yamakazi and his team pulled off this miracle, and are there lessons for entrepreneurs and business leaders outside of film?

It seems the answer is yes: Yamakazi has been candid in describing how his team conjured such an incredible result from such relatively meagre resources - and it boils down to six factors, most which can be applied in businesses way beyond the borders of film:

1. It helps when the boss has done the key job
   The director, Takashi Yamazaki, started out in visual effects - and this background minimised the gap between envisaging a scene and then describing it to Minus One's relatively small team of VFX artists. Yamakazi knew what was possible, where corners could be cut without impacting on the final product, and could speak their language.
2. Relatively tiny teams need not be a hindrance
   Minus One had just 35 artists working in the one office (to put this in context, Hollywood films can have between 600 and 2000 VFX artists). - but rather than this creating bottlenecks, their location in a single office being led by a director who knew their trade enabled faster collaboration.
3. Lower labour costs help
   Simply, production's cheaper in Japan than in Hollywood.
4. Re-use can be a good thing
   Yamakazi had worked on Godzilla: The Ride at a Japanese theme park. As he explained in an interview with Vulture.com, 'There were assets we might be able to re-use or recycle'.
5. Get a great idea down fast - you can always refine it later.
   Yamakazi told Vulture.com: "We call it the second-round or second-cycle rule... The first loop, you just run as fast as you can. But on the second round, you want to improve. So we do the first round. Let’s do everything that we feel that we want to... Then we take a step back and look at that and say, “We can do better here,” or “Let’s correct here”.
6. Intelligent economies work miracles.
   The highly detailed Godzilla model required millions of polygons - the Minus One team sculpted one half of the character, then digitally mirrored it to create a symmetrical design. This effectively cut the complex sculpting workload in half, saving both time and a ton of money.

As I re-read that list, I realised how much of it I've unknowingly employed in my working career. For example, a superb art director I was lucky enough to work with for the best part of 10 years kept every piece of design work he ever created, in the knowledge that it would come in handy one day.

The most painful website launches I've experienced usually involve a fragmented cast of hundreds, with protracted, indirect communications and a host of discordant product visions. The best involved a few people able to work fast, and with individuals who at least had a grasp on each others' roles.

And a car designer of my acquaintance once explained that working on a budget-no-object luxury barge was often joyless; the best work, he argued, had come when the budget was tight enough to force you to think... when every decision mattered.

Of course, there's one aspect of Godzilla Minus One without which no amount of team unity and smart artistic decision making could help.

Like all great Japanese cinema, it doesn't shy from dwelling on the rawest, most uncomfortable emotions or well-chosen silences - evidence, as if you needed it, that no amount of VFX can compensate for a weak story.