Godzilla (Toho films)

On the data. This page is the Japanese Toho films only. The American Legendary films, Godzilla in 2014, Kong: Skull Island, King of the Monsters, Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla x Kong and the Monarch series, are a different continuity made by a different studio, and they have their own page on this site under The MonsterVerse. Nothing from that continuity is duplicated here, and none of it is required for anything on this page. The 1998 American film directed by Roland Emmerich is not on either page. It is a TriStar production that Toho licensed rather than made, its continuity ends with a 1998 animated television series, and Toho later renamed its creature Zilla and put it in Godzilla: Final Wars, where it is destroyed in about twenty seconds. That cameo is the whole of its connection to anything listed here. Toho's own run is thirty-four films across four eras, and the eras do not continue one another. They restart. The Showa era, 1954 to 1975, is the only long continuity on the page: the films reference each other loosely, the tone slides from a serious film about nuclear devastation to children's monster wrestling, and the continuity is casual rather than strict, with Destroy All Monsters set in 1999 and written to end the series before another six followed it. All Monsters Attack is outside that chain entirely, being a small boy's daydream assembled largely from footage of earlier films, so it has no story position. The Heisei era, 1984 to 1995, throws out everything after 1954: The Return of Godzilla is a direct sequel to the original and the fourteen Showa films in between are treated as never having happened. The six that follow it are a genuine chain, ending with Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, which kills the character deliberately because Toho was about to hand the licence to TriStar. The Millennium era, 1999 to 2004, is where the structure gets strange, and it is the reason this page needs explaining. Five of its six films are individual sequels to the 1954 original that ignore each other completely. Godzilla 2000: Millennium, Godzilla vs. Megaguirus and Giant Monsters All-Out Attack each build a different present day from the same 1954 event, with a different Godzilla, different history and no shared characters. Godzilla: Final Wars is its own thing again. The one exception is the Kiryu pair, Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla in 2002 and Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. in 2003, which are a single two film story and also treat the 1961 Mothra and the 1966 War of the Gargantuas as history. So the standalone Millennium films carry no story position on purpose, and the Kiryu pair carries one. The Reiwa era, 2016 onwards, is live action reboots that start from nothing at all: Shin Godzilla has no 1954 behind it, and Godzilla Minus One is set in 1945 to 1947, which is earlier than every other film here but is not a prequel to any of them. Godzilla Minus Zero, written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki like Minus One, is the first genuine sequel of the era: it picks up in 1949 with the same family and opens in Japan on 3 November 2026 and in North America on 6 November 2026, so it is listed as unreleased. It is counted by Toho as the thirty-ninth Godzilla film overall, a figure that includes the American productions; counting only Toho's Japanese films it is the thirty-fourth. Toho's animated work sits apart from all of it. The trilogy of Planet of the Monsters, City on the Edge of Battle and The Planet Eater, made for Netflix between 2017 and 2018, is one continuous story set twenty thousand years after humanity flees Earth, and it must be watched in that order. Godzilla Singular Point, thirteen episodes in 2021, is another world again and shares nothing with the trilogy despite both being animated and both being on Netflix. Story positions on this page are per era rather than one timeline, because there is no single timeline to give. The Showa chain is numbered from the 1954 film, the Heisei chain is numbered as its own block, and so are the Kiryu pair, the animated trilogy and the two Yamazaki films. The blocks are laid end to end so that the story order view reads as a set of chains rather than a sequence, and a film with no position is one that answers only to 1954. Not listed: Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color, which is the same film in black and white rather than a separate one; the 2022 short Godzilla vs. Gigan Rex; the Godzilla Island and Godziban shorts; the 1998 American animated series; and Toho's various theme park and ride productions. Titles here use the standard English release titles, which is why the 1984 film appears as The Return of Godzilla rather than the recut Godzilla 1985, and why Giant Monsters All-Out Attack is often abbreviated to GMK elsewhere.

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