Godzilla movies have been divided into the Showa, Heisei and Millenium era’s to help represent the series that the movie belonged to. While the Millenium series ended a while ago it seems with all the new Godzilla projects in the works we’ve reached a new era. Some fan sites are already calling it the Reboot series, but is this name really appropriate?
The only thing going for it is that all previous movies always referred to the original Gojira 1954 movie as being the first and this is the first film that doesn’t acknowledge those events but even then Godzilla has gone through a lot of reboots so more than anything it seemed like Godzilla was no longer a relevant franchise until now again so it’s more of a revival so until the reboot series is cemented into the fandom I’ll just refer to it as the Revival series which started with the American Godzilla by Legendary in 2014.
Normally the American movies haven’t really counted in the series like the adaptations Godzilla King of the Monsters, The Return of Godzilla and Godzilla 1998 (GINO / Zilla). But here the interest of Japan was really started by this movie since after it did well enough we started seeing all these announcements so let’s take a look at what’s going on in the new Revival series of Godzilla.
Shin Gojira 2: A sequel to the amazing Godzilla Resurgence that was responsible in made godzilla scary again got announced recently. I absolutely loved Shin Godzilla but I’m unsure on how I feel about a sequel. This universe played it fairly realistic and any sequel would kind of take away from it unless it’s Godzilla evolving again and it still being a threat but it’d still be a bit of a rehash and if they go the route of it evolving into humans or something like it as the tail theories point out then it’d be terrible. On the other hand this confirmation was done through a fan translated interview and sometimes Japanese translations lose context in translation so maybe it was just meant that a sequel to Godzilla would be made a la the millennium series which every movie was pretty much a new continuity unrelated to the first so just maybe this Shin Godzilla 2 could have nothing to do with Shin Godzilla and just be a new movie in this Revival series.
Legendary’s Godzilla King of the monsters 2019: After the 2014 American Godzilla reboot was a big enough success they decided to think of a shared universe with other Kaiju like King Kong. The next film in the series is named after the original American adaptation’s and it’s been known that Legendary acquired the rights to Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah. We don’t know whether they’ll be used in the sequel but it’s speculated that they will based on a teaser they showed when they announced they had the rights and their cameo in Kong: Skull Island. I was not a big fan of Godzilla 2014 since I wanted something closer to Godzilla 1954 which Shin Godzilla gave us and because of that I’m no longer as disappointed with the Legendary reboot as it’s no longer needs to be the movie I wanted. So now that I got the Godzilla film that I wanted I’m fine with whatever Legendary does and I hope they go crazy with the license but who knows what we’ll actually get.
Godzilla: Monster Planet: While this will not be Godzilla’s first animated entry, it’ll be the first one made by Japan. Netflix will make it available world wide and it looks like nothing we’ve seen before. The plot of the movie is that humans left the earth after attacks of Godzilla and other giant monsters but many years later they decide to come back and the whole planet is overrun by Kaiju’s. It’s futuristic and the artwork for it looks really impressive so it should be a visual treat. This is sci-fi heavy which is fine since Godzilla has often dwelled with the genre and it should fit an anime adaptation just fine. I’m expecting tons of fan service and giant monster action with a surprisingly deep plot.
So this is only the beginning but we’ve got King Kong VS Godzilla coming out in 2020 and if the MonsterVerse is successful I’m sure we’ll see a few more movies in it. I definitely think Toho will continue to make movies whether they’re sequels to Shin Gojira or not and if the Neflix show does well we’ll see Netflix trying to get more animated Godzilla on their service.
