Screenwriter Drew Pearce, who’s called the hot property in Hollywood and is currently working on Iron Man 3 and Sherlock Holmes 3, was hired to clean-up the current script and do a “four week polish” for what was first called Godzilla 2012, and is now called Godzilla 2014, and will be released May 16th 2014.
The script for Godzilla was originally written by David Callaham (The Expendables), then David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight) came in, and then and Max Borenstein (The Seventh Son), after him. Gareth Edwards was introduced as the film’s director. Legendary Pictures’s boss and Pittsburgh Steelers Owner Thomas Tull is producer with Roy Lee, Dan Lin and Brian Rogers and Jon Jashni. Yoshimitsu Banno, Doug Davison, Alex Garcia, Patricia Whitcher, and Kenji Okuhira are executive producers.
That’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen.
The action to bring in Mr. Pearce was done by the film’s financier and distributors Warner Brothers and Legendary Pictures on October 4th, but the media covering the doings of Mr. Pearce seem to have just went with whatever press release was sent out, and didn’t periodically check social media to see if Drew was active and chatty about Godzilla 2014.
Well, this blogger did, and turned out he was and in direct contrast to Mr. Borenstein, who tweeted nothing and David S. Goyer, who’s not even on Twitter at all, and has no mention of Godzilla on his website.
Drew Pearce sent out a few Twitter tweets (@mrdrewpearce) recently that may seem harmless, but say a great deal about what to expect from what has been described to me by Godzilla producer Brian Rodgers in 2010 as a kind of reboot. Before we delve more into the online offerings of Mr. Pearce, let’s present my video interview from 2010, with Mr. Rodgers:
Now, on Twitter, Drew Pearce started in with occasional Twitter tweets about Godzilla first with a cryptic reference to “Godzuki,” and second with a rather testy one in response to BadAssDigest’s blog post, but it was clear what got under Mr. Pearce’ skin. The following is the paragraph from his blog with the most meat:
Pearce is the writer of Iron Man 3 (read: the guy whose script is being changed on set by Robert Downey Jr all the time), and he got popular off the British superhero sitcom No Heroics. He’s hot right now, with Sherlock Holmes 3 also on his plate. Anyway, Pearce’s job is to take the current script and ‘age up’ the characters. I like to imagine him just doing a Find/Replace of 22 into 44 in every character description. Considering that Monsters was about young people, I assume that perhaps previous Godzilla drafts had an equally 20something vibe, but now Legendary wants to hire more seasoned actors.
Thus Drew’s tweet:
@devincf I truly resent the assertions in your Godzilla item. I’m carefully changing the character ages ONE BY ONE, and it’s taking me ages.
— Drew Pearce (@mrdrewpearce) October 6, 2012
And no response from Devin Faraci, the writer of Bad Ass Digest.
That was October 6th. Moving up to October 9th, there wasn’t a tweet but then, this on the 10th:
@zilla92 All I can say is, it’s looking exciting, and Gareth is very very talented!
— Drew Pearce (@mrdrewpearce) October 10, 2012
And this to another Twitter account, and part of another conversation:
@47hk1794 I can’t comment (but it’s extremely epic)!
— Drew Pearce (@mrdrewpearce) October 10, 2012
And then on October 12th, and after some egging on by an aggressive fan on Twitter, Drew tweeted:
@47hk1794 I’ve said too much already! Information blackout starts here, I’m afraid!
— Drew Pearce (@mrdrewpearce) October 11, 2012
But that does in total give us a view of what to expect from this new Godzilla: a return to a kind of updating of the famous 1956 epic that started Godzilla’s long-running string of movies. The one where Tokyo gets it. The one made to avenge (in a way) the dropping of A-Bombs on Japan by the United States during World War II. The Godzilla that stomped on people, ate subway trains and electric fences, and toppled giant buildings with his atomic breath. That’s Godzilla.
And given this often repeated quote from Mr. Edwards, realistic:
I’ve always been interested in Godzilla and the ideas around him. I really wanted to see another Godzilla film and jumped at the opportunity. My main idea was to imagine ‘If this really happened, what would it be like?’ I want to take a grounded, realistic approach to a Godzilla film.
I think, to take off on that for a sec, a Godzilla attack would have massive impacts on pollution levels, radiation, water quality, and the World environment – and that’s just one event. Destroying Godzilla would take a Worldwide effort and a full scale global warning system to inform a nation if the King Of The Monsters was nearby.
What’s forgotten is that Godzilla is a creature much larger than anything around him, and thus has impacts felt over a vast range. Think of the giant smoke clouds created when something’s destroyed by his breath in an urban area. No movie except for Godzilla one has realistically displayed that situation.
But I digress.
Godzilla will come with what is described as an “interesting” soundtrack:
got to hear the sneak peak of the new Godzilla soundtrack that’s coming out in 2014….it’s gonna be interesting…
— Adrian (@Watchtowerbase) October 15, 2012
The tweets also give a view to how complicated the decision making process is with this movie, as well as what it may ultimately cost. With so many producers and exec producers, and so many writers and scripts, it seems like there’s no one strong voice but a lot of them. But that said, they all seem to want to get it right, because once it’s done, that’s it.
I’m also getting a feel for how this 3D movie’s going to cost. I’ll peg it at $300 million, and I’ll bet the exec producers want to make sure to get a massive return on their investment in Godzilla.
Stay tuned.