Godzilla Minus One's director recently confirmed a key piece of lore in the award-winning film, which has kaiju buffs rekindling old fan theories about the direction of a potential sequel.
Warning! Spoilers for Godzilla Minus One’s ending below!
At the end of Godzilla: Minus One, it’s revealed that Noriko miraculously survived the rampaging kaiju’s atomic blast, which leveled Tokyo. What’s more, Noriko mysteriously survived with minimal damage, save for an obfuscated black mark on her neck. During Godzilla Fest in Osaka, director Takashi Yamazaki confirmed that the black marks on Noriko’s neck were Godzilla cells or G-cells. Yamazaki’s remarks about Godzilla Minus One's cliffhanger not only led to a roar of applause from thousands of excited Godzilla fans in attendance but also reignited months-old fan theories about what direction a potential sequel film could take.
Lore-wise, G-cells have played a major role in creating two of Godzilla's most prominent villains, Biollante and SpaceGodzilla. In 1989’s Godzilla vs. Biolante, a scientist named Genichiro Shiragami splices the cells of his deceased daughter, a rosebud, and Godzilla’s regenerative cells, creating the plant kaiju Biollante. Godzilla’s subsequent victory over Biollante would prove pyrrhic because her G-cells mixes with a black hole (after Godzilla yetes her into outer space), leading to the creation of SpaceGodzilla.
As noted, Yamazaki’s confirmation that Noriko harbors G-cells has rekindled fan theories on the Godzilla subreddit that Godzilla Minus One’s ending has left the door open for a Biollantte or SpaceGodzilla follow-up film. The director’s words also spawned a separate fan theory that envisions a sequel film exploring the kaiju’s fifth form in 2016’s Shin Godzilla, which saw Godzilla fail to evolve into a monstrous humanoid form. Other less eccentric fan theories opted to view Noriko’s G-cells as a grounded allegory for how “Godzilla’s curse” is similar to how nuclear fallout affected the real-life citizens in post-World War 2 Japan.
In our review, we gave Godzilla Minus One an 8 out of 10, praising the film as a “rousing, spectacle-filled blockbuster” designed to make audiences stand up and cheer.
Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh.
