It's official: following the record-shattering and award-winning success of Godzilla Minus One, Toho has greenlit another Godzilla film with writer, director, and VFX supervisor Takashi Yamazaki back at the helm.
Toho announced the news on Friday, but didn't reveal any additional details outside of Yamazaki's return. The announcement comes ahead of this weekend's North American wide re-release of Godzilla Minus One and its remastered black-and-white rendition, a celebration of Global Godzilla Day on November 3 (the day the original Godzilla opened in Japan in 1954).
EMERGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT pic.twitter.com/YhfztQgu0Z
— GODZILLA.OFFICIAL (@Godzilla_Toho) November 1, 2024
After Godzilla Minus One, it's not hard to see why Toho trusts Yamazaki with the famous kaiju. After its release last October, Godzilla Minus One became the third-highest-grossing foreign-language film in U.S. box office history with $56.4 million domestically, and it's the highest-grossing Japanese film ever at the U.S. box office. Its global total comes in at $115 million, even more impressive when you consider its lean production budget of around $15 million.
"Our situation was unique, given how I was situated in the larger scheme of the overall production," Yamazaki told IGN in a previous interview. "And the fact that I had a clear goal, more perhaps than other directors, because of my VFX background. There are good inefficiencies and bad inefficiencies. We focused on the approval process in different ways to streamline certain aspects of the VFX pipeline."
What's more, Godzilla Minus One won the Oscar for best visual effects earlier this year, making it the first film in Godzilla's 70-year history to be recognized by the Academy.
For more, read our review of Godzilla Minus One, where we called it a "grand, sweeping blockbuster (that) takes the king of the monsters back to his roots in post-WWII Japan."
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
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