It’s been a long, long time since the release of Evangelion 3.0. The third Evangelion movie came out way back in 2012 in Japan, and there’s still no sign of the fourth and final film, or its release date. It’s been an increasingly long wait between each Evangelion movie, but the wait for the Evangelion 3.0+1.0 release date has been the longest yet… and the movie is still, in all likelihood, quite a ways away. And that’s ultimately because Hideaki Anno, the driving force behind Evangelion, is busy.

Evangelion 3.0+1.0 Release Date: Not This Year

Evangelion 3.0+1.0, once known as Evangelion 4.0, was loosely expected to follow hot on the heels of Evangelion 3.0. That, of course, has not happened: The third movie had a long and contentious production, and Twitchfilm notes that Evangelion creator Anno missed deadlines and often came into conflict with the studio. Of course, that all came out in the wash, because the movie did extremely well in Japan. It became the number two opening of 2012, and earned about $60 milion USD domestically all told—not too shabby for that market.

Since then, everything about Eva 4 has been up in the air. Seriously, everything. It’s not even clear whether the movie has gone into production— or even if it has been written yet. So, yeah, there’s that. And in October 2014, Anno announced that the movie has gone on hold so he could work on another project, namely Godzilla: Resurgence. That’s not coming out until later in 2016. So basically he’s not even going to resume working on the last Evangelion movie until later this year, and then we’ll probably have to wait another year or three for him to actually make the movie.

And then we’ll have to wait another few years after that for FUNimation to bring ‘Evangelion 3.0+1.0’ to the United States. After all, the home media of release of Evangelion 3.33 didn’t even come out in this market until this February. That’s not FUNimation’s fault, but the process of localizing these movies is reasonably laborious. There will be scattered screenings beforehand, like there were for Evangelion 3.0, but not a wide release in the United States.

So basically it’s going to be a long time before we get Evangelion 3.0+1.0… assuming we ever get it at all. But Godzilla: Resurgence from Hideaki Anno… that could be pretty cool too.