This Godzilla Movie Has The Lowest Rotten Tomatoes Score Of The Franchise
TriStar Pictures believed they had the surest of things when they hired Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin to make the first Hollywood "Godzilla" flick. The duo had just delivered the biggest film of 1996 in "Independence Day," and appeared poised to become a blockbuster brand name on par with Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. Every studio in town wanted to make their next smash hit. But this is where the trouble started: TriStar wanted Emmerich and Devlin to make its next smash hit.
The 1998 iteration of "Godzilla" did not originate with Emmerich and Devlin. TriStar came very close to greenlighting it in 1994 with Jan De Bont (hot off the success of "Speed") directing a screenplay by Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio (who would eventually make their franchise fortune on the "Pirates of the Caribbean" series), which would've placed it in direct competition with "Independence Day" during the summer of 1996. So this all felt awfully fortuitous.
Once Emmerich and Devlin took the gig, they were anything but humble about the challenge before them. They might not have been TriStar's first choice for "Godzilla," but they used their "Independence Day" cachet to dictate the most favorable terms imaginable. They threw Elliott and Rossio's screenplay in the trash and basically started from scratch. Though newfangled movie websites like Ain't It Cool News and Corona Coming Attractions leaked details here and there, most moviegoers only had teasers to go on. The first Emmerich-directed teaser — which featured Godzilla stomping the skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex in a museum — was called-shot bravado. We're going to smash "Jurassic Park."
It was a brilliant piece of marketing, and it was the last time "brilliant" would be used to describe anything related to Emmerich and Devlin's "Godzilla."
Roland Emmerich's Godzilla was all tease and no terror
That teaser was attached to "Men in Black" almost a year prior to the Memorial Day release of "Godzilla," and the good vibes lasted until TriStar had to screen the film for critics and shamefacedly reveal their stark naked King of the Monsters. Emmerich and Devlin made "Godzilla" on their own terms, and they made a movie that just about no one enjoyed.
The film currently holds a 20% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and that number dips to 12% when you only look at "Top Critics." Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert panned the movie, with the former even lamenting that the film's characters named after the influential critics (who were not fans of "Stargate" or "Independence Day") weren't chomped or stomped by the big lizard.
Many critics trained their ire on the mindlessness of the endeavor. The New York Times' Stephen Holden summed this up succinctly:
"The only question worth asking about this $120 million wad of popcorn is a commercial one. How much further will the dumbing down of the event movie have to go before the audience stops buying tickets?"
"It's hard to imagine Godzilla — or any movie, for now — topping Titanic in popularity [...] But Godzilla, which delivers unpretentious fun with a blithe spirit, will surely give that box-office behemoth a healthy run for its money."
As a film critic, Kevin Thomas was a lousy box office prognosticator.
Godzilla minus Godzilla
Moviegoers bought $74 million worth of tickets over Memorial Day weekend, but once the toxic word of mouth got out, the box office dropped off a cliff. "Godzilla" closed its domestic run with a stunningly low $136 million gross, and finished with a worldwide take of $379 million. TriStar's dreams of a "Godzilla" franchise were nuked.
Emmerich and Devlin did themselves no favors by drastically reimagining Godzilla's design. Their lizard is lithe; it darts down Manhattan's streets and avenues, avoiding gunfire and missiles rather than shaking off their high-caliber power. It's so unrecognizably Godzilla that, in Japan, they call this iteration of the creature "Zilla." This Godzilla also does most of its damage at night, so we never get a good, full sense of the monster's size. It's a big-budget Godzilla movie devoid of awe, which is the only reason you spend this kind of money on a Godzilla movie (which Gareth Edwards understood when he got his crack at the creature in 2014).
Is the 1998 "Godzilla" truly the worst film in the franchise's history? Yes. Yes, it absolutely is, and this is coming from someone who's seen the clip-show that is "All Monsters Attack," aka "Godzilla's Revenge," multiple times. I'll take a Godzilla movie that aims really freaking low over a would-be blockbuster made by filmmakers who don't really like Godzilla.