1969's All Monsters Attack is a very strange movie, and kind of sits apart from the rest of the series. It's the only entry where Godzilla never actually appears, all of the monster sequences happen inside Ichiro's head. And if you want to get real weird with it - something I definitely encourage - you can come up with all sorts of ideas on how Gabara is real and some sort of psychic monster, or this stuff is actually happening and Ichiro somehow is astrally projecting, or whatever. But the film itself seems pretty clear in its intention that its meant to take place in our world, where Godzilla is just a monster movie, and Gabara is a creation of Ichiro's mind based on his bully from school. So... that's fine, but what to do with that information when you're making a neocities website with timelines covering all of the films? Well... I guess you just have to make a timeline that features real world events! The rationale of what gets included here is basically, if it happened for real, and there's a fictional version of it relevant to the timeline of any of the Godzilla movies, I'll include the real historical version of those events here. The exception to this is the events of All Monsters Attack, which is a fictional story, but the world of the film is otherwise our own, so all real life lore applies to it.
Key
Superscript = These are the number of the film in the series where the information comes from, with 1 being Godzilla, 2 being Godzilla Raids Again, etc. Additional superscripts will indicate supplementary sources not present in the films themselves, which will be explained at the bottom of the page.
Bold = Below the year heading, dates and times in bold are ones that taken directly from the films. These are anchoring points used to figure out when the rest of the events take place.
251,939,051 to 251,878,051bce
The formation of the Siberian Traps lead to the deadliest animal mass extinction event in the entire history of Earth, the Great Dying. Among the victims of this extinction are the trilobites.*
226,998,051 to 201,398,051bce
An animal who's remains will later be identified as Gojirasaurus quayi dies. It is probably a very large Coelophysis mixed in with the remains of a Shuvosaurus.**
1954
March 1st, 6:45 - The US nuclear test Castle Bravo is detonated at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The blast is more than twice as large as predicted at 15 megatonnes, making it the largest nuclear detonation ever unleashed by the country, and was the largest in history at the time. Fallout from the explosion fell for miles around, well outside the predicted range, causing contamination of fish and people living in nearby islands. The Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon No. 5 was among the victims, killing one of the crew, and sparking renewed anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan.
November 3rd - Theatrical premiere of the 1st Godzilla film, Godzilla.
1955
April 24th - Theatrical premiere of the 2nd Godzilla film, Godzilla's Counterattack.
1956
April 27th - The 1st Godzilla film is heavily edited and dubbed in English, and released theatrically in the US as Godzilla, King of the Monsters. It features newly filmed footage starring Raymond Burr as the reporter Steve Martin.
1959
May 21st - The 2nd Godzilla film is picked up for US distribution, and heavily edited and dubbed in English. New footage is inserted from... somewhere??? It is truly, truly, truly baffling. More baffling is the decision of the US distributors to remove Godzilla's name from the title and dialogue, trying to pass it off as a new, unrelated monster, for... reasons??? This version is titled Gigantis, the Fire Monster.
1962
August 11th - Theatrical premiere of the 3rd Godzilla film, King Kong versus Godzilla.
1963
June 26th - The 3rd Godzilla is heavily edited and dubbed in English, and released theatrically in the US as King Kong vs. Godzilla. It features new inserted footage by horrendously terrible actors calling Godzilla stupid.
1964
April 29th - Theatrical premiere of the 4th Godzilla film, Mothra versus Godzilla.
November 25th - The 4th Godzilla film is edited and dubbed in English, and released theatrically in the US as Godzilla vs. the Thing. It features an exclusive special effects sequence filmed by Toho with the frontier missile cruisers.
December 20th - Theatrical premiere of the 5th Godzilla film, Three Giant Monsters: Earth's Greatest Battle.
1965
September 13th - The 5th Godzilla film is edited and dubbedin English, and released theatrically in the US as Ghidrah, the Three Headed Monster. The edit fixes some of the continuity issues of the original, but the dub changes Princess Salno's alien ancestry to Mars rather than Venus. Among the audiences of this run is my mom.
December 19th - Theatrical premiere of the 6th Godzilla film, The Great Monster War.
1966
June - The 6th Godzilla film is edited and dubbedin English, aside from Nick Adams, but will will not see wide release in the US until over 4 years later. The reason for this may have been because of the distributor's lack of faith in the film.
December 17th - Theatrical premiere of the 7th Godzilla film, Godzilla • Ebirah • Mothra: Great Duel in the South Seas.
1967
December 16th - Theatrical premiere of the 8th Godzilla film, Battle of Monster Island: Son of Godzilla.
1968
August 1st - Theatrical premiere of the 9th Godzilla film, Destroy All Monsters.
1969
December 20th - All Monsters Attack.
1970
March 13th - The edited and English dubbed version of the sixth Godzilla film begins showings at various continental US military bases as Invasion of the Astros.
July 29th - The edited and English dubbed version of the sixth Godzilla film finally recieves a public US theatrical release as Monster Zero.
December 16th - Theatrical premiere of Son of Godzilla.
1971
July 24th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla versus Hedorah.
Novemeber - Toho commissions an English dubbed version of the 11th Godzilla film in Hong Kong, called Godzilla vs. Hedorah.11*
1972
March 12th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla versus Gigan.
1973
March 17th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla versus Megalon.
1974
March 21st - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla versus Mechagodzilla.
1975
March 15th - Theatrical premiere of Terror of Mechagodzilla.
1980
The edited and English dubbed version of the sixth Godzilla film shows on US television and later VHS with a new title card under the name Godzilla vs. Monster Zero.
1984
December 15th - Theatrical premiere of Return of Godzilla.
1989
December 16th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla vs. Biollante.
1991
December 14th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah.
1992
May 5th - The edited English dub of the sixth Godzilla film is synced up to the uncut original version and released on VHS in the UK as Invasion of the Astro-Monsters, alongside the uncut international dubs of the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 15th films, titled Son of Godzilla, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, Destroy All Monsters, and Terror of Mechagodzilla respectively.†
December 12th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla vs. Mothra.
1993
December 11th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla.
1994
December 10th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla vs. Spacegodzilla.
1995
December 9th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla vs. Destroyah.
1996
January 20th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla vs. Destroyah.
1999
December 11th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla 2000.
2000
December 16th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla X Megaguirus.
2001
December 15th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack.
2002
December 14th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla X Mechagodzilla.
2003
December 13th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S..
2004
December 4th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla: Final Wars.
2016
July 29th - Theatrical premiere of Shin Godzilla.
2017
November 17th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters.
2018
May 18th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle.
November 9th - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla: The Planet Eater.
2023
November 3rd - Theatrical premiere of Godzilla Zero.
Sources
All otherwise unsourced deep time years are taken from the ICS timescale as of June 2023. I didn't use the ICS colors on this page because this covers both prehistoric and historical times, and it would throw off the 90's Godzilla webzone aesthetic if all the ce dates were pale yellow.
Most release dates of the films are well known with solid records of them so you can get the same information basically anywhere, and I have the original Japanese release dates of them all memorized anwyas, but if you want a source you can see them all at a glance on this wikipedia page. The weird thing about it is that it lists the live action and animated movies separately, so Godzilla Zero is 第30作 (work no. 30) instead of 33 or 0 like from the marketing countdown, which is baffling to me. Other dates for the releases of the various Americanizations and dubs are a little less ubituitous but I usually trust Wikizilla for those. Dates more obscure than that I'll leave a specific source for.
11* - The non-English dubs of these films used the international export English dubs as a basis, as the common practice of the studio was send these versions out to all international distributors. West Germany was the second largest foreign market at the time and was putting them out faster than the rest of the world, so we can assume based on the December 10th release date for Frankensteins Kampf gegen die Teufelmonster that the Axis dub should have been finished a long enough time before that for the German dub to be produced. Given that the anime trilogy went from theaters to Netflix in exactly two months, and that there's a little less than 5 months between the Japanese and West German theatrical release, two months between the two for the intermediate production of the Axis dub seems reasonable.
* - Burgess, Seth D et al. “High-precision timeline for Earth's most severe extinction.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 111,9 (2014): 3316-21. doi:10.1073/pnas.1317692111
** - Carpenter, Kenneth. "A giant coelophysoid (Ceratosauria) theropod from the Upper Triassic of New Mexico, USA." Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie-Abhandlungen (1997): 189-208.
I found it here but it's one of those fucking pay sites, so have fun spending €29 on that I guess. The genus is contested, and its diagnostic features have been variably described as being material from a Shuvosaurus or indistinguishable from Coelophysis outside of its large size. This later opinion comes from Mickey Mortimer, who is a personal hero of mine because she's so damn thorough when it comes to phylogenetic testing. You can read her assessment of the material here on her website the Therapod Database (which is really incredible and I used to get lost in it for hours back in the day, though I don't know how much she's kept up with it now).
