New Gamera series in 2015

[TithonusSyndrome]

English source, drawing from Japanese-language source

The retailer Amiami is listing the Summer 2014 issue of Kadokawa Shoten's Tokusatsu Newtype magazine for release on May 16. According to the retailer, this issue will have a lead feature with a scoop on "a new Gamera launching. Breaking a long silence, that famous Gamera will finally return! Earliest unveiling of imageboards [pre-production art]!"

The giant turtle monster Gamera made his debut in Daiei's 1965 film Daikaijū Gamera (Gamera the Giant Monster). His last feature film was Chiisaki Yūsha-tachi ~Gamera~ (Gamera the Brave) in 2006.

No western studios have jumped in, huh? I was curious to see if Gamera would get picked up in response to the recent kaiju craze, but that doesn't seem to be the case... yet. Perhaps that's for the best.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'd be amazed if anyone in the west wanted a big budget Gamera movie. Gamera movies were never very series, and rapidly got much less serious as they went full out kids film franchise. Godzilla is highly recognizable, and highly flexible on that end, and how serious it is in general. You can't really take a flying turtle with actual flaming rocket engines on his butt meanwhile, who once fought a lizard dog that used a rainbow as a weapon and put that into the framework of the relatively small number of recent western kaiju movies. They've all been or look to be serious films for an adult like audience's tastes. In conception anyway, dumb and silly in execution in the case of say Pacific Rim, but that isn't the same at all.

[TithonusSyndrome]

The Heisei films showed that Gamera could be taken seriously enough to make a more traditional and less child-oriented kaiju film, and I'd have wagered that they'd have actually done well in US theaters had they been released before Jurassic Park raised expectations. Considering that the kaiju field isn't all that chockers with properties to license out compared to comic book superheroes, I'd have just assumed that a western studio would have come across Gamera pretty soon on their list and taken some cues from the Heisei movies in their development process.

[Sea Skimmer]

Done well? Well maybe compared to the production costs, but certainly not by Hollywood standards which are one or two orders of magnitude higher generally. The Gamera America sort of knows is the flying smiling friend of children made for ten year olds, and Hollywood wouldn't touch that with a ten foot pole, let alone take cues from Japanese studios. I'd wonder how many people under 65 even remember seeing the original movies, as opposed to MST3K versions. Even the best Godzilla films released in the US were never exactly big money makers, which is of course why so many never made it anyway. None the less almost everyone knows Godzilla here, Gamera will get blank stares.

Hell even Pacific Rim which people make such a big deal about actually wasn't very successful at all in the US market, and would have been a failure had it not made 75% of its money overseas, an unusually high percentage. Even then the return was not overwhelming for being a 200 million dollar movie, and making a movie that can appeal to the entire world marketplace is never easy. The target is normally still the US first, everyone else if things go well. Doesn't help that China heavily rations foreign film imports.