Godzilla in Hollywood (Part 2)

For Part 1: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2024/03/godzilla-in-hollywood-part-1.html

 

Part 2: Godzilla’s Big Hollywood Debut

 

With the advent of home video in the 1980s, many kids were able to watch the older Godzilla movies they might have missed on television or would have missed in movie theaters when they first came out, and thus a new generation of fans were born. These were all the American dubs and the Americanized versions I covered last time, but something that took a strangely long time was for Hollywood to make their own version of Godzilla. Monster movies were not as trendy in North America in the 1970s and 1980s as they were in Japan. With the exception of the 1976 remake of King Kong, most of the ones out of Hollywood were low-budget B-movies, but as special effects slowly got better and better throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Hollywood started cooking up plans with Toho to bring Godzilla to the big screen in a way no one had seen before.

Even though an American Godzilla film was not produced in the 80s, it doesn’t mean someone didn’t try. I’m not talking about the Americanization of The Return of Godzilla, I’m talking about Steve Miner’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 3D. This was proposed to be the first American adaptation of Big G (in 3D, no less) with a script written by Fred Dekker (who would go on to do the cult classics Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad), intended to be directed by Miner. If you want to look up the premise it’s available online, but to me it sounds oddly similar to the 1962 film Gorgo, which itself was a bit of a rip-off of Godzilla, though obviously the name Godzilla is more marketable than Gorgo so whether or not it could have turned into a Gorgo remake or reboot doesn’t really matter now. Miner couldn’t get another studio to co-finance it with Toho, so he let the rights go back to them.

It’s hard for me to imagine a Godzilla movie produced in the 80s with big actors, practical effects by Rick Baker (who went on to do movies like Men in Black and the Tim Burton Planet of the Apes remake) and stop motion effects by David W. Allen (who had done When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth), directed by the guy who would later go on to direct Lake Placid. I find it easier to imagine the 90s version that also almost happened, but likewise never progressed past the pre-production stage.

Let’s go through who would have been part of the 1994 Godzilla production. First of all, director: Jan de Bont, who was a great cinematographer before he turned to directing, and went on to direct Speed, Speed 2: Cruise Control, Twister, and the second Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. Screenwriters: Ted Elliot & Terry Rossio, who clearly know how to write well, given they went on to write the screenplays for movies like The Road to El Dorado, Shrek, and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Special effects: Stan Winston. The designs for the new Godzilla and the monster he would be facing, the Gryphon, were finished before production, and they looked awesome, but what it all came down to was money.

The studio that had bought the rights from Toho in the early 90s, Sony Pictures (with the project assigned to TriStar Pictures) demanded that the project cost less than $100 million, but estimated Elliot & Rossio’s script would cost upwards of $150 million. The script couldn’t be changed any further to reduce the budget, it seemed, but de Bont thought it could be done for a minimum of $100 million. The studio refused to do it for that much, and de Bont ended up quitting the project in December of 1994. Elliot and Rossio’s script was reworked, but the studio had trouble getting someone to replace de Bont, so they ended up hiring a different team who were given complete creative control, meaning the unmade film generally known as Godzilla 1994 is now just a fanciful “what if” tale.

It had been over 40 years since the original Gojira and the monster had still not made his official Hollywood debut. The studio approached the creators of the 1996 alien invasion hit Independence Day about taking on the Godzilla project, and even though director/writer/producer duo Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were not exactly big Godzilla fans, they did it anyway. Two critical factors changed the direction of Hollywood’s first Godzilla movie in a drastic way: the advent of computer generated imagery, and Emmerich’s desire to change the look and behaviour of the monster to be more like a real animal. Jan de Bont had already stated previously all the effects should be digital effects, which was the main reason the Elliot & Rossio script put the budget up too high for Sony and ultimately led to the director and studio parting ways. After Jurassic Park’s debut in 1993, it was clear that a digital Godzilla was possible, but would be pricey to do well.

Emmerich did not just rely on CGI to bring Godzilla to life. Like with Independence Day, he employed a mixture of effects, including many miniatures, animatronics, and even a man in a Godzilla suit for certain shots, the way Godzilla had always been portrayed in Japan. In the final cut, most of the special effects shots ended up being CGI. The Godzilla design by Stan Winston for the unmade 1994 version, which was quite faithful to the original design while still being fresh and new and somehow distinctly “American”, was scrapped. Emmerich hired Patrick Tatopoulos to completely redesign the king of the monsters, and what he came up with did not look like a king at all. It fit Emmerich’s vision of a large, dinosaur-like reptile that was fast and agile, but it looked too different from any previous Godzilla iteration to really look or feel like Godzilla. As much criticism as the design has received over the years, we must not forget that Toho gave approval for the design, though they clearly regretted the decision after the fact.

Looking back on it all, I really wish the 1994 version had been made instead. It might have still not been the best Godzilla movie, but it probably would have been at least more interesting than what we ended up with. I have dumped on Emmerich’s film plenty in the past and will not rehash all my qualms with it again, but I think the problem really came down to the monster itself. It doesn’t have any personality because it’s just an overgrown iguana, it isn’t really scary, and it’s the only monster in the movie (not that Godzilla needs to fight another monster to be good, as evidenced by several Toho Godzilla films). The one thing they got right that the 1994 version would have got wrong was making Godzilla’s origins linked to nuclear radiation. In the Elliot & Rossio script Godzilla is described as being an alien creature, which is just about as disrespectful to the original concept as the Tatopoulos redesign.  

Godzilla (1998) was not a box office failure as some people incorrectly assume based on the negative fan and critical reception, but it did not make as much as Sony wanted. Ironically, the final budget for Emmerich’s version was nearly $150 million—higher than the cost Sony had previously said was too much which caused the 1994 version to be halted. There are not many similarities between the 1998 version and the 1994 script, nor are there many similarities between the ’98 film and any of the Japanese Godzilla films. It definitely comes off as a film made by non-fans of the Toho productions, and while it has moments of well executed action and destruction, it also has a lackluster narrative, uninteresting characters played by actors lacking the right charisma or intensity, and the spectacle over substance issues that plague all of Roland Emmerich’s films. If it had been branded as a remake of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, maybe audiences wouldn’t have been so cold toward it, but then it wouldn’t have had the same marquee value and probably would have been a definite box office disaster.

As much deserved criticism as the film has received, I have to say I respect Sony for admitting defeat and not forging ahead with a sequel to try to make some more money, which they could have done. The ’98 film ended with a teaser that one of Godzilla’s offspring had survived, and there had been plans for a trilogy of films, but the sequel took the form of a Saturday morning cartoon called Godzilla: The Series, and Sony let the rights lap in 2003. At least the 1998 film remained the only bad American adaptation for all those years—but, at the same time, it also remained the one and only American Godzilla movie out there, and it was not worthy of the name. It would be many more years before Godzilla would rise again in an original Hollywood production, and the stakes would be higher than ever, because if they got it wrong a second time, that could be the last chance.