History lesson!
Eiji Tsuburaya, the head of Toho's effects department, co-created Godzilla, Mothra, and the rest of those classic monsters and then established Tsuburaya Productions in the 1960s to bring the heat he was bringing to the big screen to the small screen. The sci fi/mystery show Ultra Q was a sensation, and the follow-up, Ultraman, was even bigger. A giant superhero who fights giant monsters, Ultraman became an icon, and a long-lasting franchise with dozens of shows and movies (and merchandise) running to the present day, where Tsuburaya produces a new Ultraman series for Japanese TV every year.
... but there's a parallel story, too. The story of trying to break Ultraman out internationally. While there has been some success on the overseas front in recent decades (China has been a growing market recently), the dream of a Hollywood production has been Tsuburaya's white whale since... uh, forever.
The original Ultraman was dubbed into English and had a successful run on US television in the 70s through the early '80s. Tsuburaya tried to capitalize on this initial success since the late '70s, when the success of Superman (1978) inspired them to try to get a Hollywood Ultraman movie made. PDidn't happen. What followed was two decades of the company focusing on failed projects. Most never got off the ground, and the few that did (a few VHS tapes, a 13 episode Australian series) came and went in the US leaving little impression. In the mid '90s Tsuburaya decided to shift their attention back to their bread-and-butter of Japanese TV. Ultraman Tiga came out in Japan in 1996, and since then Ultraman has been a consistent presence, in his own homeland at least!
Further complications came in the form of a Taiwanese company fraudulently claiming to have the international rights to the character. That also happened in 1996, and since then Tsuburaya was embroiled in legal battles that sucked at their time and resources, deprived them of overseas licensing revenue, and stymied any plans for international expansion until 2018, when Tsuburaya won the definitive court case asserting their ownership of Ultraman. Since then they've been busy licensing - for instance, you can buy Ultraman blu-rays and toys at your local Walmart! Certainly a far cry from my childhood of mailing off for bootleg tapes and imported toys!
But the two most ambitious projects they have in store? Ultraman is going to the movies baby!
A new, live action Japanese feature film from the creative team behind Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi), Shin Ultraman, will come out in Japan sometime this year! It's a reboot of the original series and international releases are yet to be announced. Here's the teaser!
But that's not all! Finally, the long-promised, semi-mythical Hollywood Ultraman movie is finally coming, and it takes an unexpected form: an animated film from the creator of Kubo and the Two Strings, a coproduction between Tsuburaya, Netflix and ILM!
https://en.tsuburaya-prod.co.jp/news/2629Baseball superstar Ken Sato returns to his home country of Japan to pick up the mantle of Earth-defending superhero Ultraman, but quickly finds more than he bargained for when he’s forced to raise the offspring of his greatest foe, a newborn Kaiju. Struggling to balance the roles of teammate and new father, Ken must confront his own ego, his estranged father, and the conniving Kaiju Defense Force to rise up and discover what it truly means to be Ultraman.
Oh, what a long, strange trip it's been.