The Big Picture
- Godzilla's 1998 American remake was a creative failure that deterred studios from attempting the character for over a decade.
- Director Jan de Bont's version of an American Godzilla movie in the 1990s offered a unique take, featuring other monsters and an Atlantis origin story.
- De Bont's project ultimately fell through due to high costs and a clash with 1990s blockbuster norms, but his ideas aligned with the successful modern MonsterVerse films.
The final few months of 2023 have been quite fruitful for Godzilla, one of the most prolific monsters to ever grace the silver screen. Not only has this gigantic lizard anchored the acclaimed hit movie Godzilla Minus One, but this character has also been at the center of the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters show and even headlined the first trailer for Godzilla x Kong: A New Empire. With all these high-profile pop culture entities anchored by Godzilla making waves throughout the world, it can be hard to remember now a darker time for Godzilla fans at the end of the 1990s. This is when Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla stomped into theaters and delivered an incredibly unpopular iteration of this famous lizard.
Armed with a design that removed everything people loved about Godzilla in the first place, this late-nineties incarnation of Godzilla was a creative bust that warded away American studios from tackling this character for well over a decade. The ironic part about this movie’s failures, though, is that there was a point in time when a potentially superior American Godzilla feature was in development. Before Emmerich and his team from Independence Day were assigned the production, director Jan de Bont was helming a radically different version of an American Godzilla movie. In some ways, this proposed project would have been closer to the initial Japanese version of this figure, while other key changes to the character (namely his origin story) would’ve surely miffed viewers around the world. Still, given how disastrously that 1998 movie turned out, one cannot help but look back on this alternate version of an American Godzilla movie in the 1990s and wonder…could it have been better?
Godzilla Minus One
PG-13Sci-FiActionAdventureDramaPost war Japan is at its lowest point when a new crisis emerges in the form of a giant monster, baptized in the horrific power of the atomic bomb.
- Release Date
- December 1, 2023
- Director
- Takashi Yamazaki
- Cast
- Ryûnosuke Kamiki , Minami Hamabe , Yûki Yamada , Sakura Andō
- Main Genre
- Sci-Fi
- Writers
- Ishirô Honda , Takeo Murata , Takashi Yamazaki
The Birth of an American Godzilla
In October 1992, TriStar Pictures announced that it had secured the rights to make an American version of Godzilla. When this news was unveiled, the plan was to get the project in front of cameras by the end of 1993 while the heads of TriStar insisted that this incarnation of the character would not abandon the sociopolitical subtext of the classic Japanese version of the same character. Those plans never materialized, but by July 1994, Sony/TriStar did secure a director for this remake: Jan de Bont. Starting off as a cinematographer on iconic titles like Die Hard, he had shifted gears to directing with the hit film Speed, which raced into theaters just a few weeks before this announcement dropped. That Keanu Reeves film convinced TriStar brass that they had found their guy to bring Godzilla to life and de Bont was enthusiastic about getting the project off the ground.
In this initial announcement about him signing on as Godzilla’s director, de Bont expressed enthusiasm over how TriStar was willing to spend oodles of money on groundbreaking visual effects work to bring the movie to life. He also optimistically projected that the motion picture could be ready to go by 1995, another release timetable that never came to pass. De Bont's version of this film got far enough along that iconic creature designer Stan Winson put together sculpts for what Godzilla and the movie's other monsters could look like. Yes, you read that right, other monsters. While the final version of the first American Godzilla movie would only have the famous lizard duking it out with the military, de Bont's version would've seen this beast squaring off with other monsters.
However, this feature was not planning to employ famous pre-existing Godzilla adversaries like King Ghidorah and Rodan. Instead, a new winged beast called The Gryphon was conjured up for the film. Further deviations from the norms of Godzilla mythology would have emerged through a new origin story that depicted Godzilla as a creation of Atlantis rather than the byproduct of man’s nuclear energy fixation. Bizarrely, this strange idea of linking an American version of Godzilla and Atlantis would return decades later in the 2019 film Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Jan de Bont and his writers were just ahead of their time when it came to making connections between this gigantic monster and that famous underwater city!
Why Did This Godzilla Movie Never Happen?
In her 2014 song “Wildest Dreams”, Taylor Swift sang the lyrics "He's so tall and handsome as hell He's so bad, but he does it so well", which could easily double for how Godzilla fans would describe that massive lizard boy! More importantly, though, a common refrain in that lyric is “nothing lasts forever.” This was as true for Jan de Bont’s Godzilla as it is for anything else, as the project would crumble by the end of 1994. In a 2020 interview with Polygon, de Bont remembered the project with fondness and recalled how the proposed cost of the film's visual effects were the biggest hurdle to making it a reality. De Bont couldn't help but comment on the irony that his proposed Godzilla remake was shot down for costing a projected $100 million...only for the final Roland Emmerich remake to soar well above those costs.
De Bont offered further retrospective comments on the unrealized project to Yahoo! Movies in 2022, further confirming that his version of Godzilla would've been realized through a man in a suit. The mind reels to imagine all the visual effects wonders that could have been accomplished with de Bont directing a Godzilla movie utilizing Stan Winston practical effects and monster suit mayhem! Though Jan de Bont doesn’t explicitly bring up this reason for why his Godzilla project failed to take off, his dedication to mimicking the vibes of classical Godzilla titles likely doomed his remake as well. Though this approach would’ve made fans of this monster movie franchise happy as a claim, such an aesthetic was directly at odds with the norms for 1990s blockbusters. Titles in this era were focused on human beings navigating extraordinary circumstances (like the project de Bont focused on instead of Godzilla, Twister), not monsters.
Did 'Godzilla Minus One' Just School Hollywood on Movie Making?
Let's not get carried away, there's a middle ground to be found here.It's no wonder, then, that Sony/TriStar opted to embrace Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin for the final version of the first American remake of Godzilla. With their work on Independence Day, Emmerich and Devlin provided the exact template of the default 1990s blockbuster. Fascinatingly, though, de Bont’s ideas that were out of step for 1990s tentpoles turned out to be right on the money for 2014-onward big budget American films anchored by Godzilla. Each of the MonsterVerse movies featuring this scale-covered character have gone through great pains to depict Godzilla duking it out with other monsters while these titles have increasingly shifted the focus away from the humans and back onto the monsters.
Granted, these motion picture are entirely reliant on CGI rather than the practical effects wizardry Jan de Bont wanted to employ. However, the consistently monster-heavy vibes of modern American Godzilla movies (and the solid box office track record of many of these titles) indicate that de Bont was on to something with his creative instincts on his Godzilla project. What did not fly in the nineties is now the blueprint for any modern Godzilla film made outside of Japan. Now there’s a happy outcome that Jan de Bont circa. 1995 couldn’t have imagined coming to pass even in his “wildest dreams.”
Godzilla (1998) is available on Hulu in the U.S.
