The word ‘Kaiju’ had already entered popular usage in the west with the success of Guillermo Del Tero’s own take on the genre, Pacific Rim.
The word has since been used extensively in Asian pop culture when referring to giant animals in monster movies.
Recently, director of Godzilla: King of Monsters, Michael Dougherty took to Twitter to explain why the nomenclature for their story’s monsters was changed from Kaiju to MUTOs and Titans.
For the reboot of Godzilla, however, the monsters are initially called MUTOs, which is the acronym for Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms.