Godzilla Minus One didn’t even need half a minute’s worth of footage to send the kaiju faithful into a mouth-watering frenzy. Indeed, cinema’s favorite giant monster may have latched on to a bit of franchise fatigue by way of the MonsterVerse, but sometimes you can just tell that copious amounts of heart went into something, and Minus One gives off those exact vibes.
The film is set to take the King of Monsters back to his roots in their most pure form, as the wondrously reimagined Godzilla emerges against a backdrop of an atomic bomb-devastated Japan, taking the country’s economic state from non-existent to something less than non-existent.
Those quake-inducing footsteps and hair-raising roars are all we needed to prepare to line up for Minus One, and apparently the same can be said for one of the industry’s most creative bastions.
In a recent tweet in response to a quote from Minus One mastermind Takashi Yamazaki, the one and only Guillermo del Toro offered up his praise for Godzilla’s new design, and his promise to stand at the ready when the film releases overseas.
Del Toro, of course, is something of a giant monster movie architect himself, with the filmmaker having co-written and directed the 2013 film Pacific Rim, a high-profile love letter to the genre and those adjacent to it, and del Toro’s highest-grossing film to this day.
The storied horror maestro may have his nose buried in a different sort of monster at the moment (the filmmaker’s Frankenstein adaptation is in development at Netflix), but it’s no surprise that he’d happily dish out the love for beasts of all shapes and sizes if given the chance. Perhaps it won’t be long until the legendary kaiju or one of his contemporaries falls into the hands of del Toro himself; now there’s a film we’d camp outside the cinema for.
Godzilla Minus One will arrive in North American theaters on Dec. 1.
