Japan­ese Godzil­la reboot in the works

The work­ing title for Toho’s 29^th film fea­tur­ing the King of Mon­sters is ​‘Godzil­la 2016’. Putting their intend­ed release date ahead of the sec­ond instal­ment of Gareth Edwards’ 2014 reboot, due in June 2018. Toho have said that the demand for a Japan­ese ver­sion of the mon­ster has been grow­ing ever since a new Hol­ly­wood ver­sion was announced.

Hidea­ki Anno and Shin­ji Higuchi are slat­ed as direc­tors, with Higuchi throw­ing down the gaunt­let to the British direc­tor with the state­ment ​“Play­time is over.” He claims they will deliv­er, ​“the great­est and worst night­mare” for fans, and giv­en the his­to­ry often ano­dyne US and UK remakes of Japan­ese films, this new iter­a­tion will hope­ful­ly bring the ter­ror back to the monster-movie.

Edwards’ ori­gin sto­ry received com­plaints from Japan­ese view­ers, who claimed that Godzil­la had been made too fat to be scary. Toho are report­ed­ly look­ing to turn up the ter­ror in 2016.

With a pro­mo image of Godzilla’s foot­print released with a state­ment that the mon­ster will ​“tow­er over 108-meter-tall incar­na­tion in … the 2014 Hol­ly­wood film”, it seems Toho have an axe to grind with the watered-down US offer­ing. The domes­tic pro­duc­tion of Godzil­la 2016 allows it to go ahead with­out any con­flict to the con­tract with Legendary.

The land­scape of the Godzil­la uni­verse is set to get very con­fused as these very dif­fer­ent fran­chis­es plan to run con­cur­rent­ly but sep­a­rate­ly. With Higuchi in charge of updat­ing the studio’s CG tech­niques, Toho believe they can cre­ate a pic­ture that stands up to the Hol­ly­wood behe­moth. If they can pro­duce a visu­al­ly impres­sive fea­ture, Leg­endary, and co pro­duc­ers Warn­er Bros, are going to have to engage in an inter­est­ing skir­mish as they bat­tle against the inno­va­tion and cult sta­tus of Toho.