One Cut of the Dead

In Japan, the film sold 2,149,449 tickets and grossed ¥3,040,246,069 in 136 days.[3] It became the seventh highest-grossing domestic film of 2018, grossing ¥3.12 billion ($28.3 million) at the Japanese box office.[4][5] It made box office history by earning over a thousand times its budget.[6]

Overseas, the film grossed NT$53 million (US$1.76 million) in Taiwan,[7] HK$7.06 million (US$909,530) in Hong Kong,[8] $154,123 in South Korea,[9] $52,406 in the United States and Canada, and $2,903 in Iceland,[10] for a worldwide total of $31,178,962.

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 100% Certified Fresh approval rating based on 83 reviews, with an average rating of 8.57/10. The site's critical consensus states, "Brainy and bloody in equal measure, One Cut of the Dead reanimates the moribund zombie genre with a refreshing blend of formal daring and clever satire."[11] Metacritic reports an 86 out of 100 score, based on 14 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[12]

Writing for Variety, Richard Kuipers declared the film to be a "marvelously inventive horror-comedy [that] breathes new life into the zombie genre", and attributed its success to "its irresistibly bouncy spirit [...] it positively sparkles with the infectious “C’mon everyone, let’s put on a show!” enthusiasm that’s served the movies so well since the days of Andy Hardy."[2] Elizabeth Kerr of The Hollywood Reporter found the film to be "a breezy and often laugh-out-loud hilarious zombie comedy", noting that although the film "sags in the second act as it sets up the third, it’s not so much that it loses all the steam it generated out of the gate."[1] David Ehrlich of IndieWire, opined that the film was "so heartfelt and hilarious that it’s easy to forgive the contrivances that hold it together, and to overlook how transparently Ueda reverse-engineers most of his best gags. Seemingly unimportant details in the film’s sluggish middle section blossom into killer jokes some 30 minutes later"[13]