Grandgear: The Godzilla Minus One Director's Giant Robot Film Has a Cast and a January 2028 Date

Photo: David Kernan, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Takashi Yamazaki made Godzilla Minus One for about fifteen million dollars and won a visual effects Oscar with it, so the question since then has been what Hollywood would let him do next. The answer is Grandgear, an original sci-fi film at Sony with J.J. Abrams and Glen Zipper producing for Bad Robot, and this week it got a cast and a new date. Sony moved it up from February 18 to January 14, 2028.

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Sam Nivola, who was in The White Lotus and The Perfect Couple, and Nico Parker from The Last of Us and How to Train Your Dragon are the leads. Deadline reported that Paul Giamatti is in talks to join them, which would be his first big studio film in a while. Nobody has said what any of them play, because Sony is keeping the plot locked down.

Photo: Montclair Film Festival, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What we do know comes from a CinemaCon teaser in April that very few people outside the room have seen. It showed giant robots fighting a kaiju in a city, shot handheld in a way that a few attendees compared to Cloverfield. Yamazaki wrote the script himself and is directing, and he also tends to supervise his own effects, which is how Minus One looked the way it did on that budget.

Photo: Karon Liu, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The reason I am paying attention is the timing. Godzilla Minus Zero, his sequel to Minus One, opens on November 6, and if that lands the way the first one did, Grandgear becomes one of the more interesting bets of 2028. A Japanese effects director doing a mech film in English with an American cast is not a combination we have had before, and Pacific Rim, which is the obvious comparison, was a very different kind of loud.

Photo: Danielle G. Campbell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Filming is expected to start in 2027, so there is a long wait and probably a long silence ahead. Are you more excited for this or for Minus Zero next week?