Godzilla , only the second film directed by Gareth Edwards, opened with $93.2 million. It’s one of the best-ever debuts for a filmmaker who’s never made a studio movie before.
It's Godzilla!
Warner Bros. Pictures
Gareth Edwards
Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
Godzilla rampaged through theaters this weekend, grossing an estimated $93.2 million, by far the best domestic debut for a Godzilla movie in the creature's 60-year history. Success on this scale with such a venerated cinema icon would be a triumph for any filmmaker, but it is especially sweet for Godzilla's director, Gareth Edwards. It's only the second feature film he's ever made, and the first with a studio budget — or a budget of any kind, really.
Edwards' first film, 2010's Monsters, won wide acclaim for wringing a taut, human-scaled monster movie from a reported $500,000 budget. Edwards not only directed that independently financed film, but also served as its writer, cinematographer, production designer, and sole visual effects artist.
Monsters grossed just $237,000 in the United States, and another $4 million internationally, but Edwards' work caught the attention and respect of many within Hollywood. Just a few years ago, that would have been enough to land Edwards a gig at a studio directing a mid-budget, low-stakes thriller to prove himself capable of marshaling the small army necessary for a modern Hollywood production.
Instead, Legendary Pictures chief Thomas Tull — who produced Godzilla and co-financed it with Warner Bros. Pictures — chose to hand Edwards a reported $160 million budget and one of the most esteemed creative properties in cinema history, announcing his decision with high-profile panache at Comic-Con in 2012. It was an enormous gamble, especially considering that Godzilla's monumental place in popular culture has never been reflected all that well at the American box office. (The less said of Roland Emmerich's 1998 Godzilla, the better.)
Tull is not alone with this particular gamble, either. Studios have of late given the reins of mega-budgeted, high-stakes movies to truly untested filmmakers who have never before directed a Hollywood production, let alone one with a budget pushing well past $100 million. Sony did it with Marc Webb and its The Amazing Spider-Man reboot — Webb's only previous feature credit was the well-received indie romance (500) Days of Summer. Warner Bros. did it with Noam Murro and 300: Rise of an Empire — Murro had only made the rather forgotten 2008 indie comedy Smart People. For 2012's Snow White and the Huntsman and 2010's TRON: Legacy , Universal and Disney respectively hired commercial directors with zero feature film experience: Rupert Sanders and Joseph Kosinski.
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