JP Nunez
It’s a good time to be a kaiju fan. For the past ten years or so, we’ve been getting a whole bunch of awesome giant monster movies like Pacific Rim, the MonsterVerse films, and Shin Godzilla, and this mini-golden age isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. We’re getting Godzilla vs. King 2 in 2024, Netflix is giving us a Norwegian kaiju movie called Troll next month, and now, we’ve just gotten quite possibly the best news yet: Toho, the Japanese company that owns Godzilla, has announced that they’re going to bring the king of the monsters back to the big screen on November 3, 2023 (in Japan, at least; the new film will most likely come to Western audiences sometime later).
The studio hasn’t released any plot details yet, but we do know that Takashi Yamazaki is set to direct the film. I have to be honest, when I first heard that name, I had no idea who this guy was, but after I did a bit of digging, I became convinced that this was very good news indeed.
For starters, Takashi Yamazaki knows his way around this franchise. He worked on the visual effects for Toho’s last live-action Godzilla film, Shin Godzilla, and he’s directed some Godzilla-centric scenes before, including a cool little cameo in his movie Always: Sunset on Third Street 2. On top of that, Yamazaki has also won multiple awards at the Japan Academy Film Prize (AKA the Japanese Academy Awards), so the big G is definitely in good hands with him.
Beyond the director, we don’t have any concrete information about this new film, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably going to be either a reboot or a direct sequel to the original Godzilla. I think Shin Godzilla was a bit too experimental to be the start of a new timeline within the franchise, and the way Toho has continually rebooted the series for the last 20 years or so makes me think they’re going to do it yet again.
Of course, we won’t know for sure until the studio lets us in on their plans, so keep your eyes peeled for more announcements from them in the coming months. And as always, when we here at Horror Obsessive learn more about this new project, we’ll be sure to let you all know.
