Fans of giant monsters seem to be very split on director Mike Dougherty's GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS. Some love it, some hate it, some thought the monster scenes were awesome, others were disappointed with the monster scenes and felt like lame human scenes overshadowed them. Different people seem to have seen different versions of the movie. Our own Paul Shirey gave the film a 9/10 review.
GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS has turned out to be a bit of a box office disappointment, as apparently the chance to see Godzilla, Ghidorah, Mothra, and Rodan together again wasn't as much of a draw as we thought it would be and the studio hoped it would be. Its theatrical run isn't over yet, but now we're looking ahead to the eventual home video release, and Dougherty has already mentioned some things that might be on that release.
Speaking with Collider, Dougherty discussed the fact that the 132 minute version of KING OF THE MONSTERS in theatres now was trimmed down from a cut that was around 160, 165 minutes.
There weren't a lot of whole scenes that got lifted out. There are a few, and they'll end up on the Blu-ray and home video version. But a lot of it was trimming moments within each scene. You'd be shocked at how much you can streamline a film just by dropping a line here, a word there. We have a large ensemble cast, so … in any Godzilla movie there's always the moments between the fights where everyone's going, 'What just happened? What are we going to do now?' So there was a tendency to give each character a moment to express their opinion, chime in, ask a question. And that adds up with a cast this big. So we quickly realized, 'Okay, not everybody has to have a voice at the roundtable in every scene.' So it was a lot of trimming lines of dialogue or moments, exchanges between characters within a scene, and they're so subtle and minuscule that it's not even worth putting it in the bonus features."
Cutting those little moments helped, but what about those whole scenes that came out?
I want to say there's roughly six to eight scenes, actual legit full scenes. And they're a fun watch. If we were doing Godzilla: The TV Series, they would be perfectly great scenes. But when you're trying to make a two hour plus movie, pacing is a very important consideration. … What I found on this particular film was, it was too front-loaded. There was too much set-up. The first act was dragging. Because when you're going through the writing process, especially when you're working with a studio, especially on a genre film where there's so many things you do need to set up, it's such a strange world that you're entering, there's a tendency to overexplain in the first act because Exec A doesn't understand the rules of, 'What are kaiju, and where do they come from?' So you find that you're padding all these scenes to flesh that out more and then, lo and behold, when you get the cut in you realize, 'Okay, we're overexplaining. The audience gets it. We can take this scene and truncate it down from three pages to half a page.'"
Dougherty didn't go into details on those six to eight cut scenes he believes will be on the home video release, so hopefully there will be some interesting stuff in there. However, judging by what he was saying, it sounds like the cut scenes just involve more interactions between the human characters, and I've heard enough complaints about them that I don't think there are going to be many fans who are anxious to spend even more time with them.
The human characters in GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS are played by Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Sally Hawkins, Kyle Chandler, Zhang Ziyi, Aisha Hinds, Charles Dance, Thomas Middleditch, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Randy Havens, Jonathan Howard, Anthony Ramos, Bradley Whitford, Elizabeth Ludlow, David Strathairn, and Ken Watanabe.
A presentation of Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures, in association with Toho Co., Ltd., this film was produced by Mary Parent, Alex Garcia, Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni, and Brian Rogers. Zach Shields, Barry Waldman, Hiro Matsuoka, Keiji Ota, Dan Lin, Roy Lee, Yoshimitsu Banno, and Kenji Okuhira serve as executive producers, with Ali Mendes and Jay Ashenfelter co-producing for Legendary.
Dougherty wrote the screenplay with Zach Shields, and they both get story credit along with Max Borenstein.