SUNDAY, MAY 24. I’m at an old movie house in Brooklyn, the kind that people used to call a “nabe” — a neighborhood theater, far removed from the grand palaces downtown, where moviegoers went to see a double-feature with a cartoon and a newsreel for a quarter. But there are no double-features anymore, and everything that plays at the present-day movie palaces now shows simultaneously in the nabes. It’s Day Five of Godzilla, the $ 160 million monster movie that opened on 7,363 screens, and I kept insisting to my Brooklyn friend that we had better order tickets by phone because it was sure to be sold out. “Nothing sells out in Cobble Hill,” he said, and he was right.

But he was also wrong, because Godzilla was supposed to sell out everywhere it showed. Sony Pictures arranged that Godzilla would be showing on one of every five movie screens in the United States to take advantage of those sellouts. That’s why it was made; indeed, it’s the only reason Godzilla was made: Nobody was compelled to remake a 1954 Japanese-American hybrid about a dinosaur that stomps on Tokyo.