[Insert Roar Noise Here]: Director Gareth Edwards Leaves GODZILLA 2

Here's some bad news for fans of 2014's Godzilla: director Gareth Edwards, who relaunched the film series with that entry and was slated to direct Godzilla 2, has left the sequel.

Deadline reports that the separation is amicable between the director and Legendary Pictures, and that the studio knew Edwards was moving on before they announced the new release dates for Godzilla 2 and Godzilla vs. King Kong earlier this week. The director reportedly "has his own gestating projects he wanted to pursue, and they are smaller in scale than the back-to-back tentpole-size pictures" he's been working on with 2014's Godzilla and the highly-anticipated Star Wars spin-off Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. He started out with a super-small indie called Monsters before making the astonishing leap in budget to Godzilla, and I'm assuming he was dealing with even more money (mo' money, mo' problems) on Rogue One, so I certainly don't blame him for wanting to get back to basics and make a smaller movie again. Max Borenstein wrote this film's script, and the now-directorless Godzilla 2 is slated for release on March 22, 2019.

So what exactly will Edwards do instead? /Film recently spoke with Timur Bekmambetov, who was supposed to produce a film for Edwards once titled Forever that was reportedly about a young human child and a robot companion who search the galaxy for mankind's origins, and the producer seemed hopeful that the two would eventually be able to collaborate on that project. Maybe now that Godzilla 2 is out of the picture, Edwards will give that movie his full attention.