GODZILLA (1994): Jan De Bont's Unmade TriStar Film

[daikaijusaurus]

[XvGojira]

[Shin_Edda_Robo!!!!!]

I'm guessing his design will be a lot less Jurassic Park-y and much closer to Godzilla

[kpa]

Ricardo told me he's quite proud of his Godzilla designs.

The color piece on his blog was done as a sample for his job interview. After he was hired his early sketches had more of a dinosaur/Beast from 20,000 Fathoms look, but production designer Joe Nemec pushed for a stronger resemblance to Godzilla. In the article, Ricardo talks about the evolution of his approach to Godzilla and how everyone (Jan, Joe, himself) were happy with his final pass before Winston Studio took over.

[Rody]

[Andrew Nguyen]

Overall this was an outstanding article by any standard and one that hopefully a lot of people have read or will read.

[tbeasley]

[lhb412]

^Can totally see Croker's fingerprints in that piece, even with it being drawn in such a different style then most of the stuff I've seen from him.

Gone to soon.

[jellydonut25]

In a way, I'm glad the 1998 film went so wildly different.

What would irritate everyone more: seeing GODZILLA get taken down by fighter planes, or seeing an iguana called Godzilla get beaten by conventional weaponry?

[lhb412]

^Took me a second to get your meaning, as I was fairly sure that the De Bont Godzilla wasn't taken down by planes.

This has probably been covered before, but for a minute I thought that in a universe that had the Jan De Bont Godzilla we wouldn't have Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, because the plots were so similar, but then I thought about the chronology for a second and I guess that doesn't wash: the De Bont Godzilla was set to begin production in '94, but it wouldn't have been released until summer '96. Plenty of time for GOTU to be released in Spring '95 and beat it to the punch.

[Benjamin Haines]

[lhb412]

^Twister was actually a huge movie for my childhood. We live in 'tornado alley' and the '89 tornado was still fresh in everyone's mind (I was a baby), so there was a really big buzz about this tornado movie. I suppose it makes about as much sense as surviving an atomic bomb and getting excited for this movie where atomic bombs create a giant monster.

[lhb412]

Twister was on some channel yesterday and it got me thinking about this unmade film again. This film would have been much more ambitious in terms of CGI than Jurassic Park, and that was part of the reason it didn't happen, right? Jurassic Park had so many shots of practical dinosaur animatronics by Stan Winston's studio and only like a quarter of the dino footage was CGI. The new technology was used judiciously. Now, if we look at other mid-'90s film with lots of CGI creatures the results are often subpar. I'm thinking specifically of the flat, cartoony animals of Jumanji. I wonder if this film had been made if the effects would be looked upon as groundbreaking like in Jurassic Park or T2 or Titanic or as dated as Jumanji?

[jellydonut25]

It probably would have been right about there with the 1998 film, honestly. Part of the reason that got the go-ahead was their claim that they could make it for half the budget proposed under this story's treatment, and I think they wound up going DOUBLE this film's proposed budget. That's my recollection, anyway.

[lhb412]

^Yeah, I believe the De Bont version was deemed to expensive to produce and the '98 film was promised for less but ended up costing more.

[Henry88]