No filmmaker is going to openly trash the film they just made when it’s still playing in theaters or trying to drum up home video sales, but you could almost taste the apathy Roland Emmerich had towards Godzilla, seeing as it basically seeps out of every frame.
It may have been a fittingly monster-sized success after hauling in $379 million at the box office, racking up an estimated $400 million in ancillary revenue, and launching a popular animated series, but a 19 percent Rotten Tomatoes score coupled with abandoned franchise plans and two Razzie wins from six nominations tells the true story.
Cinema’s most prominent Master of Disaster openly admitted that he regretted everything about shooting Godzilla, while screenwriter Dean Devlin admitted he dropped the ball big time. Even stewards of the legendary kaiju Toho were highly critical of the blockbuster creature feature, leaving genuine supporters of the monster mash very thin on the ground.
It would appear that at least a handful of them are iTunes subscribers, though, with FlixPatrol confirming that Godzilla has stomped back out of irrelevancy to take a sizeable bite out of the platform’s global charts. The MonsterVerse ignited with a vastly superior version a decade and a half later, but Gojira’s Hollywood bow as the star of an effects-driven epic couldn’t have gone much worse from a qualitative standpoint, even if it did end up making a ton of money.
If the director, writer, and production company behind a movie tell you that it sucks, then you’ve got to take them at their word.