by Benjamin Haines » Sat Jul 15, 2017 11:52 pm
Maybe he meant that Toho's contract with Legendary stipulates that Toho cannot produce a new live-action Godzilla movie while Legendary is in active production on the 2014 film or one of its sequels. Toho had a similar deal with TriStar regarding the 1998 film and its would-be series. Once it was clear that TriStar and Sony were not proceeding on a sequel to GINO, that's when Toho started work on Godzilla 2000. That deal required TriStar and Sony to begin production on a GINO sequel within five years of the first film's release or their rights would lapse, so I guess if they had decided to move forward with it during that time, Toho's Millennium Series would have been cut short.
Legendary was developing Kong: Skull Island while Toho was making Shin Godzilla but now Legendary's Godzilla sequel is in the middle of filming. It makes sense that their deal with Toho would prevent Toho from shooting another live-action Godzilla movie at the same time, but it's cool that Toho is working around that by taking Godzilla to the anime feature format.