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Long before Godzilla 98 aka zilla, long before Gareth Edwards 2014 rebirth - there was Steve Miner (Friday the 13th 2&3, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and Lake Placid) 1983's Godzilla: King of the Monsters 3D... The film was going to combination man-in-suit and stop-motion effects...
The flick was going to center around Godzilla trying to find baby Godzilla... Both Toho and Warner Bros. were interested, but eventually the budget became too expensive, the project was dropped...
In 1994 Speed director Jan De Bont was set to take on Godzilla, the screenplay was written by Terry Rossio and Ted Eliott... Stan Winston Studios handled the design for the American monsters... The plot center around Godzilla battling creatures called Gryphon... but once again budget concerns killed the project.. The film was dropped by TriStar in favor of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's script..
The American version of Godzilla finally hit the big screen in May 1998, the film had almost nothing in common with the classic Godzilla films... The flick received mostly negative reviews and is hated by most Godzilla fanboys.. There were plans for a sequel, but in 1999 Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich left the project over budget issues, the sequel was soon canceled..
In the early part of the last decade director Joe Dante (Piranha, The Howling, Gremlins 1&2, Innerspace and The 'Burbs), was set to helm the low-budget Godzilla Reborn! The flick would go old school man-in-suit approach.. The film would have been a sequel to Godzilla 2000 - the script was written by Michael Schlesinger... Godzilla Reborn was going to be produced by Columbia Pictures, but the studio eventually pulled the plug.. In a recent interview with SciFi Japan, screen-writer Michael Schlesinger talks about the canceled project...
"My concept was to approach it like an Aaron Sorkin script: The characters bicker and banter but are basically united against a common problem," said Schlesinger. "Part of the problem with most Godzilla films is that the human characters take themselves so-o-o-o seriously, and that’s a large part of why the monster scenes seem funny by comparison. My belief was that by keeping the human scenes light-hearted and the monster scenes serious, audiences would at best be less inclined to laugh at the monster scenes, or at worst, they’d be laughing throughout — but at least that’s a consistent tone."
"I structured it as a sort-of sequel to GODZILLA 2000, retaining the Miyasaki character," he continued. "The action was fairly archetypal. Godzilla stomps his way through most of the islands on his way to Mauna Loa. By the third act, we find out why: An eruption awakens a sleeping monster called Miba, a giant bat-like creature made of molten lava. And the battle is on."
"One of the things I liked most about the script was that it explored the dichotomy between how Americans and Japanese perceive Godzilla, something that had never been done before," the writer further explained. "We see him as a hero who saves us from other monsters or aliens; the Japanese see him as pure destruction. I really liked exploring that."
The film was going to Star: Bruce Campbell, Christopher Lee and Jamie Lee Curtis... The project got canned when a new producer took over at Columbia Pictures...
(Source: DreadCentral.com)
