Toho has a “Godzilla Room” that establishes rules to respect their property in each iteration

There are ways to respect canon and the integrity of the characters that live within it. For example, we’ve heard of series bibles, but they don’t always work the way they’re supposed to—or the way fans think they should.

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Nothing seems to stop Hollywood from taking liberties with the established traditions of Tolkien, Lucas, Marvel, The Witcheror DC to name a few.

Unless they’re dealing with Toho and its kaiju Godzilla. The Japanese studio, like the rest of the American content Americans enjoy, exists in an isolated bubble, shielded from the whims of our film industry.

If you want to play with them, you have to play by their rules – and they have a few for their giant dinosaur.

In fact, they have an office whose job it is to make sure the big guy is respected on screens at home and abroad. Toho’s “Godzilla Room” has fallen into the shadow of Godzilla Shin and oversees each project to protect the brand, and to do this, they apply strict criteria to filmmakers.

The Room’s director Tetsuya Yoshikawa explained in an interview with Livedoor that there were two specific mandates: Godzilla Minus One And Godzilla x Kong had to respect above all.

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“One of the big rules is that Godzilla never dies and he doesn’t attack people or things. We also checked these elements from the beginning of the script for Godzilla Minus One. The same goes for the Hollywood version,” Yoshikawa said via Movieweb.

“Managing the film by clarifying agreements and principles, rather than relying solely on intuition, also contributes to the film’s credibility,” he added.

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Hollywood could take a leaf out of this book, though it’s nothing new in Toho’s strategy. In the mid-’90s, they had a veritable encyclopedia of demands they made of Roland Emmerich when he was making his ’98 adaptation. He ignored them and freely made a movie he didn’t want to make.

Very few people were happy with the finished product, including Toho executives. How happy were they with all aspects of GxK And Minus one It remains a mystery. You can’t look at these movies and say that Godzilla didn’t do anything to harm anything, beyond a reasonable doubt.

But… as long as they made money, right?

NEXT: Roland Emmerich Didn’t Want to Make His Controversial Godzilla Movie

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