Kaiju History: The Time Spider-Man Killed A Godzilla Movie That Could Have Starred Bruce Campbell And Jamie Lee Curtis
Hollywood’s attempts to make a Godzilla film are more plentiful than you realize. Every decade since the 80s has had a noteworthy effort that didn’t get off the ground, and there were a lot more of those than finished projects at one time. Kaiju fans ‘eat good’ these days as they say, but in the tail end of the 90s we had only one American-made Godzilla to brag about, and it was pretty divisive.
The Godzilla directed by Roland Emmerich was everywhere, including your local Taco Bell, and to this day (like it or not) the film has its fans who accept it as an entry in the series. However, the people at Toho who count weren’t among them, and they knew they had to act fast to bring their big boy back the way they saw fit.
Godzilla 2000/Godzilla Millennium arose from that push to close the decade for Tokusatsu and it left the lasting impression Toho was hoping for. Directed by Takao Okawara and pitting Gojira against the space mutant Orga, the hard reset of an installment is considered one of the best in the franchise and in the Millennium Era it started.
The film was regarded highly enough to receive a dubbed and rewritten North American release, which sparked the talks and development of the proposed sequel I want to talk about here. Godzilla Reborn was a suggested direct follow-up to Godzilla 2000 penned by the American version’s writer and producer Michael Schlesinger.
The idea began as a joke made in passing to Robocop producer Jon Davison when Schlesinger ran into him on a studio lot. “I`m friends with Joe Dante [Gremlins] and Jon Davison, and one day late in 2000, I bumped into Jon on the lot – he was producing THE SIXTH DAY at the time,” Schlesinger explained in an interview with SciFi Japan he participated in after Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla released.
“I mentioned that Toho had liked our version [of GODZILLA 2000] so much that they were using it in some other countries where it hadn’t yet opened, such as India, and were even playing it in Tokyo for a week before GODZILLA VS. MEGAGUIRUS opened,” he added.
“Jon said, ‘Yep, you`re really Mr. Godzilla now.’ I replied, ‘Yeah, and if this company [Sony] is smart, they`ll get you, me and Joe to do the next American one,’” Schlesinger recalled. That was that until Schlesinger gave the idea some thought and convinced Dante and Davison to work on it with him. It was soon passed along to Columbia Pictures, and the project was given a tentative budget of $20 million.
Comparing his script to The Wrath of Khan in how he was going to scale things back, and Aaron Sorkin’s writing as far as how characters bicker but ultimately unite, Schlesinger began to type his screenplay. He wanted the characters to be funny, so he wrote in a general who spouted Yiddish like Mel Brooks, a cop who drank a lot, and a “skirt-chasing smartass” hotel manager.
They were contrasted by monster fights that were supposed to be taken seriously. “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,” Schlesinger said.
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Similar to Godzilla ‘98 and Shusuke Kaneko’s Giant Monsters All-Out Attack, the main character was a female reporter “tired of doing fluff and wants to do more serious journalism.” Jamie Lee Curtis was floated as a potential casting and probably for that lead role. Bruce Campbell was also considered and he would have been a perfect fit for either the drunken cop, the hotel manager, or the Jewish general. Others they desired casting included Scott Bakula, Christopher Lee, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Picardo, and Dick Miller.
The story was to take place in Hawaii where Godzilla would turn up, like in 2014, but after his fight with Orga and rampage across Japan in the previous outing. The US military would intercept and manage to kill the King of All Monsters halfway through – only to realize they need him to defeat a new creature that crawls out of the woodwork. Godzilla’s foe would’ve been a bat monster made almost or entirely of lava, since he emerges from a volcano, named Miba.
America cloned Godzilla in the first draft. That clone became the new KOAM and unleashed hell against Miba. When Toho read this, they were happy with it except for the death and cloning aspect of Godzilla, so they requested that Schlesinger change that part. He did and Godzilla’s demise turned into a coma. How he is revived in the third act is unclear, but a cue could’ve been taken from Godzilla 1985 and its radioactive lightning.
No designs of the creature exist but it sounds a little like MonsterVerse Rodan and Camazotz from the Kingdom Kong comic. Godzilla Reborn never made it to the storyboard or concept art stage as it was never greenlit. It all existed on the page and mostly in Schlesinger’s head. But why? What caused this one to get canceled like so many others?
It boils down to two factors: one, Columbia Pictures had the option and the appointed a new Head of Production, Sid Ganis. He’s won some Emmys in his career but Ganis is also the producer of such ‘masterpieces’ as Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo. At the time, late 2000-01, Sony/Columbia was also developing Spider-Man, which as we all know was years and years in the making. It commanded a bigger budget and a greater deal of attention.
According to Schlesinger, Ganis wouldn’t read his script and said to him, “I’m in the Spider-Man business. $20 million movies aren’t on my radar.” Apparently, Ganis wanted to throw money around and he wasn’t the only one. Sony paid $5M to make a Godzilla sequel, which they didn’t, so the amount was written off. Schlesinger wanted to shop his idea around elsewhere, but Toho wanted even more money and demanded a sky-high fee he could not pay.
Godzilla Reborn died right then and there in the earliest phase of development possible. Echoes of it can be picked up on in subsequent films from Kaneko’s to Edwards’, and even 2019’s King of the Monsters where the big guy was out of commission thanks to the military and the Oxygen Destroyer. Schlesinger would live to see the rise of the MonsterVerse though he thought Edwards’ characters were bland, and that he wasted Bryan Cranston.
Unfortunately, Michael Schlesinger passed away this year and won’t see where the MV or Toho’s Reiwa Era goes from here with Godzilla x Kong 3 and Minus One’s sequel. Back in the mid-2010s, he didn’t know what the future held for Godzilla in America, but he wasn’t optimistic.
“As for where they should take the franchise from here, I honestly don’t know. But if it’s just going to be the kaiju equivalent of the Bum of the Month Club, people are gonna lose interest pretty quickly. Toho learned that the hard way more than once,” he said.
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