Godzilla: Toho Exec Reveals the Rules the Kaiju Can Never Break

Godzilla has been taking over the world for the past couple of years with not only a new release in Japan, but in the West as well, and it turns out that every version of the famous kaiju has to follow some very particular rules! Godzilla made it big in Japan with the 70th anniversary of Toho’s long running franchise with the release of Godzilla Minus One last year. It not only went on to be the most successful Japanese Godzilla film in franchise history, but was a critical and award winning success. But that was only the beginning of it all. 

Fans got to see yet another take on Godzilla with a new MonsterVerse entry, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, and it still felt just as much like the classic Kaiju as fans were hoping. Speaking to Livedoor, the director behind the “Godzilla Room” (Toho’s group dedicated to just on Godzilla’s projects alone) Tetsuya Yoshikawa explained that while they oversee Godzilla’s many projects, there are some very set rules each version has to follow such as the fact that Godzilla can never die nor will it prey on people or things. 

What Are Godzilla’s Rules? 

The “Godzilla Room” is a group of 14 people within Toho established after the release of Shin Godzilla in 2016 to focus on all of Godzilla’s business with the main goal of making sure there’s no damage to the brand. As Yoshikawa explained, the Godzilla Room team studied all of the previous Godzilla films and wrote up a set of rules that future projects and merchandise need to follow. Yoshikawa revealed that this most recently applied to both Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. 

“Some of the big rules are that Godzilla never dies and that Godzilla does not prey on people or things,” Yoshikawa stated. “We checked these things from the script stage for Godzilla Minus One as well. The same goes for the Hollywood version. Managing the film by clarifying agreements and principles, rather than just going by intuition, also leads to the credibility of the film.”

Which means that even when it comes to smaller efforts like Godzilla’s team up with McDonalds, Toho is closely monitoring each release to make sure that those versions of Godzilla feel like the real thing. So no matter what kinds of new forms or looks the Kaiju might take, it’s still Godzilla at its core. 

via Livedoor