There’s a very distinct line between a successful blockbuster and a good one, something that should have been made abundantly clear when Michael Bay’s five Transformers movies combined to earn upwards of $4 billion at the box office. It’s very rare that a filmmaker actively despises their own creation, though, but Roland Emmerich really doesn’t like 1998’s Godzilla.
To be fair, he’s not exactly alone when the $150 million creature feature was blasted by both fans of the iconic creature and audiences who were simply looking for a good time at their local multiplex. A 19 percent Rotten Tomatoes score was about what it deserved, while upwards of 250,000 users have only deemed it worthy of a 28 percent audience approval rating.
It did at least manage to devour a decent box office total of $379 million, but Emmerich wasn’t the only one who breathed a major sigh of relief when the blatant sequel-baiting ending proved to be a pointless addendum. The filmmaker has gone on record saying he wished he’d never made the film in the first place, with screenwriter Dean Devlin admitting he’d messed up, while even rights-holders Toho were massively critical of the end product.
All that aside, the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia seem to be getting thicker by the day, so there was always the chance Godzilla could ultimately end up being reappraised through the lens of a modern-day reevaluation. However, we’re thrilled to report that the consensus gathered by a Reddit threat trying to do just that 25 years on from its release has been shot down in a ball of flames, so it’s okay to say that the soggy epic still sucks, because it very much does.