Godzilla lands in Chicago for 70th anniversary, 24-hour movie marathon at Music Box Theatre

Godzilla has made landfall in Chicago — as part of a weeklong, 70th anniversary birthday bash in the monster’s honor filled with film screenings, guests and activities at the Music Box Theatre.

The event, "Godzilla vs Music Box," runs through Thursday at the theater, 3733 N. Southport Ave. in Wrigleyville.

On Friday night, the theater hosted a double feature of the most recent Godzilla films, “Shin Godzilla” and “Godzilla Minus One” by Japanese entertainment company Toho. The main event, a 24-hour movie marathon of 23 of the 35 monster movies from the ’50s through ’70s, kicked off at noon Saturday and runs until noon Sunday. By the start of the run, the 650-capacity theater was nearly sold out — a fraction of the 5,000 expected to come through during the week, according to Kyle Cubr, senior operations manager at the theater.

Cubr has been trying to do the Godzilla movie extravaganza for almost a decade. Coming out of the pandemic, while film studios were still hesitant to release as many films, Music Box hosted a kung fu and kaiju movie weekend. The success proved there was interest, and the Japanese Arts Foundation reached out for the 70th anniversary. The opportunity seemed perfect, he said.

A lifelong Godzilla fan, Cubr said it all started when he rented 1963’s “King Kong vs. Godzilla” as a kid, and saw Roland Emmerich's 1998 “Godzilla” in theaters. The local news interviewed him while they did a story at a nearby zoo on the iguanas the movie said Godzilla grew from; he got a copy of it from his mom, and it will air before the movie plays at 5 p.m. Sunday.

“A lot of people love Godzilla, and I just want to share that love,” Cubr said. "Happy birthday, Godzilla."

In addition to the movies, guests such as Svengoolie and Field Museum Insects Collections assistant Jim Louderman — who will be bringing live bugs in before the screening of 1964's “Mothra vs. Godzilla” — are going to accompany the movies through the week, in addition to vendors.

Tuesday, the film that started it all, 1954’s “Godzilla,” will be introduced by film historian David Kalat, who has authored two books on Toho's monster movies.

The self-proclaimed “Godzilla scholar” was introduced to the series via a drive-in theater double feature that kicked off with the 1973 flick “Godzilla vs. Megalon,” which remains a favorite. However, when he started moving into studying film, he began to realize critics didn’t take the movies seriously or give them enough credit.

In his eyes, the movies’ innovations cemented them in film history, creating a “pantheon” of their own.

“A lot of what was written about Godzilla movies in that era was not only dismissive, but also racist,” the La Grange Park resident said. “Entertaining people is so much harder than depressing people; anybody can do that. If you want to get people enthusiastic and to care about your characters in a culture and language they don’t belong to, that’s extraordinary. These movies were made by artists at the top of their game.”

As an extension of this, some of the later, more tonally serious movies were changed in the English versions to make them live up to the campy expectations studios believed people had, even when it took away from movies like the 1984 “Return of Godzilla,” Kalat said. It was released a year later in the States, going from a “dark horror film” to a disjointed comedy with erratic tone shifts.

According to Kalat, the movie’s original Japanese version has only seen a handful of screenings in the U.S., but Cubr managed to land a film copy in his quest to pull together as many 35-millimeter reels as he could — even reaching out to private collectors to acquire rarer cuts. Though he didn’t get them all, including many of the “Heisei Era” movies, he said he’s pursuing them for future screenings.

Kalat said he’s excited to see the movie’s original version again, but he’s even more excited to share the experience with others.

“We have an increasingly fractured pop culture world where being able to have a shared experience like this is so hard,” he said. “So to bring all these movies together like this with an audience that’s primed for it is unique.”

Longtime fan and South Loop resident Winter D'arcy, 21, dragged along her friend Rosalie Allen, also of the South Loop, to stand outside the theater at 9 a.m. Saturday, two hours before doors opened. D'arcy, a fan of 24-hour movie marathons, already knew where she wanted to sit in the theater, though she was most excited to experience what Kalat had described.

"It's become such a huge communal event," D'arcy said. "I haven't seen any of these in a theater ever, so being able to experience these films with a crowd is a big deal for me."