Is it true that Battle of Gods was made as a response to Dragon Ball: Evolution?

[WittyUsername]

I remembered seeing a supposed quote by Toriyama in regards to his decision to return to Dragon Ball, as well as his disappointment in DBE, but did he really say that he made BoG specifically as a response to the live action movie?

[VegettoEX]

Battle of Gods itself was already in production independent of Toriyama: Yusuke Watanabe was writing the script and Tadayoshi Yamamuro was doing the character designs. Toriyama came in and effectively rewrote the entire film and redid the character designs; all of this is documented on the respective page in our website's movie guide.

As for the connections to Evolution:

In his comment from the Battle of Gods theatrical program book in 2013, Toriyama stated:

By the way, the battle scenes in the second half are particularly overwhelming! I was moved because the presentation exceeded my expectations. While I had expected, "It probably won't be any good," it was greatly different from a certain country's live-action movie, which really was no good. Just as you'd expect, Japan's animation is superb! Everyone on the staff, you really did a great job!!

In his introduction to 2016's "Super History Book", Toriyama stated:

I had put Dragon Ball behind me, but seeing how much that live-action film ticked me off, and how I revised that script for the anime movie and complained about the quality of the TV anime, I suppose somewhere along the line it’s become a series I like too much to ever leave alone.

[sintzu]

At least evolution resulted in something good happening to the franchise. You can tell Toriyama really didn't like it as he's never talked like that in any interview I've read before. It would be interesting to see where the franchise would be today if he didn't get involved with BOG.

[SuperSaiyaManZ94]

At least evolution resulted in something good happening to the franchise. You can tell Toriyama really didn't like it as he's never talked like that in any interview I've read before. It would be interesting to see where the franchise would be today if he didn't get involved with BOG.

Yeah, i wouldn't be surprised if Toriyama became more personally involved with the later DBZ films starting with Battle of Gods if he saw Evolution as a total desecration of the series that he'd labored for just over a decade on in serialization and which had become a global franchise in the ensuing years since he had finished out the manga in 1995.

I mean hypothetically if i were in the same position as him (as a manga artist) and i created a series that eventually became crazy popular around the globe like Dragon Ball had done then a live action film adaptation a la Evolution that bombed epically in theaters was produced, i'd probably be really pissed off too to see my work completely mangled and bastardized in such a horrific way.