Minus 30 years before this film about the birth of Godzilla was abandoned!

Has the Hollywood industry found a new martingale with Godzilla? Since 2014’s rather solid Godzilla signed by Gareth Edwards, cinema’s most famous giant monster, originally a Japanese creation – who recently shined in the excellent Godzilla Minus One – has never stopped putting his big angry paws on. On screen, more or less happily: Godzilla 2 – King of the Monsters, the upcoming Godzilla x Kong crossover, Godzilla Vs Kong, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters series…

It’s enough, no doubt, to do a little more to anesthetize the bad memory of Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla, which admittedly grossed $379 million worldwide but was unanimously considered an artistic failure. So much so that the license was suspended for years.

In fact, another project built around Godzilla was in the works before Emmerich’s film in the early ’90s, as revealed in a fascinating article on the Godzilla website. Collider. A origin story Radically different from the 1998 film, signed more by a director who would crown the success of his first film as a director: Jan de Bont.

In October 1992, TriStar Pictures has announced that it has secured the rights Revised and Revised Hollywood Style Adaptation License. The idea was still fast: the first turn of the cranes was planned for the end of 1993, with a theatrical release aimed at 1995.

Speed ​​director at the wheel

In July 1994, the studio announced that it had found a director to helm the project: Jan de Bont. At the time, the future director of Speed ​​and Twister was best known for being the very famous director of photography, a longtime collaborator of Paul Verhoeven and John McTiernan. It was to him that we owed Crystal Trap Photo, Basic Instinct, The Hunt for Red October, Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, Lethal Weapon 3… in short: a reference in his field.

In the wonderful telescope of the calendar, Jan de Bont has just climbed the box office. speedIt was released on American screens in June. Enough so that TriStar Pictures has found a director capable of producing this adaptation.

Legendary make-up artist and special effects designer Stan Winston got to work On various iterations of the Godzilla monster, as well as other planned monsters, because the creature would not be alone. It was thus decided that, unlike the creature’s known adversaries, a new one would appear; A winged monster named Gryphon.

The new Origin Story should also serve the environment. Exit the birth of Godzilla after the nuclear tests that are the DNA of the license. In this new film, the monster was supposed to be a creation of the inhabitants of the mythical city of Atlantis, who were meant to fight the winged creature Gryphon.

Unplugged project… since 1994

However, the film project ran out of steam very quickly; Since the end of 1994 actually… what happened? In an interview with the site polygon In 2020, the filmmaker gave several answers: the budget was largely increased by visual and special effects.

“It became a struggle because of the budget. So the person who ended up making the film He said that 40-50 million dollars less than my budget could do it. Mine cost, I think, about $100 million. Of course, this never happens – and his film cost almost twice my budget. Unfortunately, they believed him.” The budget for Emmerich’s film will actually be estimated at $130 million, minus the marketing budget, as always…

The writers I had were fantastic, the script so good. I stayed true to the old Godzilla movies. We went very far into pre-production: location scouting, set design… and then they saw the budget: “Oh. No, we’re not going to spend that much on a Godzilla movie. In the end, they spent almost twice “.

Jan de Bont will deliver in September 2022 Yahoo MoviesStill on his Stillborn Godzilla, delicious anecdote: The creature had to be played by… a man in a suit! “It was a guy in a suit! It was amazing. There was something human about his movements. The guy in the suit was sweating like a pig and told us that he was losing a pound a minute because the rubber in the suit weighed more than 50 kg… He told us that only one He could make a shot.