One of the surprise box-office hits in the U.S. in 1952 was a reissue of King Kong (1933), then a 19-year old movie. It had already been reissued twice--in 1938 and 1946--but in 1952 it went out in a saturation-booking, meaning it opened in many theaters across the country at one time, and RKO Radio Pictures spent a large amount of money on radio and television advertising--concentrating ad money on what was then thought to be the competing medium of TV was a rarity at the time. King Kong's multi-million dollar grosses were noted by many in the industry who wanted to duplicate the success--the first film out of the gate with a new giant-monster-on-the-loose was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). That film would prove to be enormously influential, and is also significant for being the first solo feature project for stop-motion animation maestro Ray Harryhausen.

In Japan, producer Tomoyuki Tanaka of Toho Studios read a synopsis of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in a trade magazine, and it inspired him to create a homegrown monster-on-the-loose. The first script for what would become Gojira even included an attack on a lighthouse, imitating a scene in Beast. Due to budget and schedule restrictions, Tanaka and director Honda were not able to utilize the time-consuming stop-motion special effects process, so Gojira was brought to life as a man-in-a-suit by effects expert and longtime Kong fan Eiji Tsuburaya.

The name "Gojira" is a combination of two Japanese words: gorira (gorilla) and kujira (whale), the name immediately evokes the image of a creature of great size and power. According to Godzilla lore, the word was already being used at Toho Studios as a friendly nickname for a burly crew member who worked on the lot, so its application to a major new movie was something of an "in-joke" for the studio. The name "Godzilla" was the proper transliteration of the Japanese title into Roman letters under the most common transliteration schemes of the 1950s, and it was already on Toho's paperwork when they licensed the film to the American distributors.