At the beginning of the 90s, an Origin Story on Godzilla revised and corrected with Hollywood style was to see the light of day, even before Roland Emmerich’s film released in 1998. An interesting project, which will ultimately be unplugged…
Has the Hollywood industry found a new martingale with Godzilla? Since the rather solid Godzilla signed by Gareth Edwards in 2014, the most famous giant monster of cinema, originally a Japanese creation, – which has just recently shone with the formidable Godzilla Minus One -, has never stopped to put its big angry paws on the screen, with more or less happiness: Godzilla 2 – King of the Monsters, the upcoming Godzilla x Kong crossover, Godzilla Vs Kong, the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters series…
Enough to undoubtedly contribute a little more to anesthetize the bad memory of the Godzilla delivered by Roland Emmerich in 1998, which had certainly grossed 379 million dollars worldwide but remains unanimously considered as an artistic failure. So much so that the license was put on hold for years.
Toho Co., Ltd.
In reality, another project built around Godzilla was in preparation before Emmerich’s film, in the early 90s, as revealed in a fascinating article published on the Godzilla website. Collider. A Origin Story radically different from the 1998 film, signed what is more by a director who will be crowned with the success of his first film as a director: Jan de Bont.
In October 1992, TriStar Pictures announced that it had secured the rights of the license to make a revised and corrected adaptation with Hollywood style. The idea was still to move quickly: the first turn of the crank was planned for the end of 1993, with a theatrical release targeted for 1995.
The director of Speed at the helm
In July 1994, the studio announced that it had found the director who would helm this project: Jan de Bont. At that time, the future director of Speed and Twister was best known for being a very renowned director of photography, a long-time collaborator of Paul Verhoeven and John McTiernan. It was to him that we owed the photo of Crystal Trap, Basic Instinct, The Hunt for Red October, Black Rain by Ridley Scott, Lethal Weapon 3… In short: a reference in his field .
In a wonderful telescoping of the calendar, Jan de Bont had just been propelled to the top of the Box office with Speed, released in June on American screens. Enough to reassure TriStar Pictures of having found THE director capable of producing this adaptation.
DR
Legendary makeup artist and special effects designer Stan Winston began working on different iterations of the Godzilla monster, as well as other planned monsters, as the creature would not be alone. It was thus decided that, unlike the creature’s known opponents, a new one would emerge; a winged monster called Gryphon.
A new Origin Story was also to serve as a setting. Exit the birth of Godzilla following nuclear tests, which are the DNA of the license. In this new film, the monster was to be a creation of the inhabitants of the mythical city of Atlantis, intended to fight the winged creature Gryphon.
An unplugged project… From 1994
The film project was however pulled the plug very quickly; from the end of 1994 in fact… What happened? In an interview given to the site Polygon in 2020, the filmmaker gave some answers: the budget largely inflated by visual and special effects.
“It became a battle over the budget. So the person who ended up making the film [NDR : il parle de Roland Emmerich] said he could do it for about $40-50 million less than my budget. Mine cost, I think, about $100 million. Of course, that never happens – and his movie ended up costing almost twice my budget. Unfortunately, they believed him.” The budget for Emmerich’s film will actually be estimated at $130 million, excluding the marketing budget, as always…
DR
“The writers I had were fantastic, the script was so good. I stayed true to the old Godzilla films. […] We had gone really far in pre-production: scouting out filming locations, designing the sets… And then they saw the budget. “Oh no, we’re not going to spend that much on a Godzilla film. In the end they spent almost double [pour le film de Emmerich]”.
Jan de Bont will deliver in September 2022 to Yahoo Moviesstill about his stillborn Godzilla, a tasty anecdote: the creature had to be played… by a man in a suit! “It was a guy in a suit! It was so awesome. There was something human about his movements. The guy in the suit was sweating like a pig, telling us he was losing a pound a minute because the suit rubber weighed more than 50 kg… He told us that he could only do one take at a time.