Juliette Binoche is the latest actor to sign on to Legendary’s English-language Godzilla remake. Variety is reporting that the actress is in negotiations though details about what her role may be are being kept under wraps.

The Chocolat star will be joining Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen under the direction of Gareth Edwards when the film goes into production later this year for a May 16, 2014 release date.

Man did the news this morning of the new American Godzilla remake getting a start date really shake loose more news about the film. Let’s break it down into bullet points -

• First off, before cameras start rolling in March 14th in Vancouver and Hawaii (as clarified by Aint It Cool), the project’s script will be getting one last going over from Frank Darabont. This is, of course, very good news. (Via Deadline.) Previously, Drew Pearce, Max Borenstein and David Goyer had all worked on the screenplay.
• With the screenplay still being worked on, there are no formal offers out to actors to appear in the film. However, last fall the studio did talk with Joseph Gordon-Levitt but he passed back in late November/early December. (Via Hollywood Reporter.)That isn’t to say that the studio and producers aren’t thinking about certain actors who they might approach. Variety’s Justin Kroll has heard a few of the names reportedly in contention -
  

  I’ve heard that other names being considered include Henry Cavill, Scott McNairy and Caleb Landry Jones

  — Justin Kroll (@krolljvar) January 7, 2013

  JGL and Cavill are studio choices, Scoot and Caleb are creative choices

  — Justin Kroll (@krolljvar) January 7, 2013

  With the brass at the studio following the production of Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel which stars Cavill as Superman, their endorsement of him for Godzilla must be good news for Man Of Steel, right?

  McNairy is an interesting choice and he has worked with Edwards before, on the director’s debut film Monsters. Jones is also a good choice but is scheduled to start work on X-Men: Days Of Future Past a month after Godzilla is set to start so I don’t see him being able to take the job.

• The departure of of producers Dan Lin and Roy Lee is a bit more acrimonious sounding that was initially reported. The Hollywood Reporter is stating that although the two were the ones who brought the project to Warner Brothers and financiers Legendary back in early 2010, Legendary was looking to reduce their producer’s fees. When Lin and Lee refused, Legendary began exercising a “pay-or-play” clause in their contracts to remove them from the project. It is possible that the dispute may end up in court, though I don’t think that it will impact the film getting made or released.
• Signing on to the film as a producer is Mary Parent, who brings some giant monster experience with her having worked on Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Pacific Rim. (Via Deadline.)

Get ready America, because Godzilla has taken another step towards theaters.

Hit Fix and drew McWeeny is reporting that the new US-produced adaptation of the classic Japanese giant monster franchise has been given a start date by Warner Brothers and that cameras will start rolling in Vancouver in March. Additionally, producers Dan Lin and Roy Lee have left the project.

The greenlight reportedly comes in the wake of a presentation director Gareth Edwards gave studio brass that walked them through exactly what his film would be. (Presumably this would have cntained some of the footage that Edwards screened at Comic Con last summer, a still of which showed up online recently.) Hit Fix speculates that Lin and Lee’s departure is the result of their own visions for the film differing with Edwards and the studio making sure that “everyone onboard the picture shares that same vision.”

Don’t be too upset for Line and Lee however, as they have a number of projects on their development slate right. Lin is currently a producer on the upcoming Lego film and the studio’s Sherlock Holmes franchise as well as overseeing work on the upcoming Justice League comic book adaptation, a film adaptation of Stephen King’s It and an adaptation of the anime series Death Note. In addition to working with Lin on It and Death Note, Lee is also involved with Spike Lee’s Oldboy remake, a Poltergeist redo, a sequel to last year’s The Woman In Black and an English-language version of the controversial Japanese film Battle Royale.

Godzilla is currently being targeted for a 2014 release.

One of the big surprises at the San Diego Comic Con last summer was the unveiling of a teaser trailer for director Gareth Edwards’s English-language Godzilla film. Surprising, because the project was (and still is) months away from commencing principal photography and yet it contained several scenes of destroyed buildings and culminated with a look at the Big G itself.

Disappointingly, the trailer was never released, either officially or through less than official channels. But now those of us who weren’t in the Comic Con hall can now get at least a glimpse of the scale that was conveyed thanks to a screen grab that has surfaced on a Facebook fan page for the upcoming film. (Click on the picture for a larger view.)

Take a close look and you can see one person standing on that toppled building, hinting that Edwards is certainly looking to make an epic in scale film. Hopefully, it will be in support of a story that isn’t quite the brainless action film that the previous American attempt at a Godzilla film was but more in line with the tone and themes of the original Japanese Godzilla.

Currently, the script for the film has just undergone a rewrite by Drew Pearce and Edwards is busy prepping the film to start shooting next year in order to meet the scheduled May 2014 release date.

The King of Monsters himself, Godzilla, has been on a bit of a sabbatical these past couple of years since Toho Studio’s 2004 Godzilla: Final Wars. But Warner brothers and Legendary Pictures have been slowly developing a return to the big screen for the Big-G and it looks as if it is ready to get in front of the Cameras.

Speaking to The Playlist, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (The Avengers) stated that director Gareth Edwards now has the project set to shoot this coming spring –

We don’t start shooting until March of next year. I’m in the process of testing what our visual approach will be. It’s wonderful working with Gareth. He’s a wonderful filmmaker and somebody who understands the camera.

We still don’t know much about the story of the film, except that it should concern a giant rampaging, radioactivity-breathing lizard monster, but we do know that the film’s screenplay is by Max Borenstein and Drew Pearce working from a story by David S. Goyer with Dave Callaham working on a draft as well.

Godzilla stomps into theaters on May 16th, 2014.

I don’t think that anyone wants a repeat of the 1998 American version of Godzilla, least of all Warner brothers and Legendary Pictures, the folks who are bankrolling a new English version of the classic giant monster story. To that end they’ve hired Gareth Edwards, who has already showed some facility with the genre in his own low budget film Monsters.

It also sounds as if they are paying careful attention to the script already worked on by David Callahan, David Goyer and Max Borenstein. Variety is reporting that a new writer has been added to that list – Iron Man 3’s Drew Pearce.

With the studio reportedly happy with the screenplay’s core story, Pearce is coming on board to help “age up” the characters prior to casting getting underway.

It’s an interesting concern about a screenplay to have and it sounds as if Edwards and Warners isn’t interested in just populating the film with a bunch of twenty-something model types. More than repeating the 1998 Godzilla, I don’t think that anyone wants a repeat of Denise Richards-as-a-nuclear physicist that we got in 1999‘s The World Is Not Enough.

Given that Pearce is supposedly working on the script for a four week period, I would suspect that we will be hearing about whom night be in that cast before the end of the year.

It’s been a couple of months since we’ve heard any news on Legendary Picture’s planned Godzilla movie. Presumably, Max Borenstein is still working away on revisions to David Goyer’s original screenplay. And while he is doing that, it appears as if some design work for the film has been going on as well.

A while back kaiju magazine G-Fan ran some art that they report as being two possibly rejected designs for the big G himself, but they haven’t shown up online until this week. Comic Book Movie is the one who initially posted the art, and some more purported designs haveshown up in the comments thread.I haven’t seen any verification that the designs are legit, so take what you are seeing here with a grain of salt. But if they are for real, it looks as if Legendary could be on the right track to make this a better film than the last time an American studio tried their hand at a Godzilla film.

Max Borenstein will be helping Godzilla lumber across American movie screens. The writer has been hired to work on the screenplay of the new American adaption of Japan’s Toho Studios’ famous monster star that Legendary Pictures is in the process of developing. Previously, David Goyer was the writer on the project when it was first announced back in July.

Although not a known name for genre projects, Borenstein has worked with Legendary on their in-development bio-pic of rock legend Jimi Hendrix and has done a rewrite on the supernatural fantasy The Seventh Son. He has also just turned in to Warner Brothers his screenplay The Art Of The Steal.

I’m not surprised that another writer writer has been added to the project following Goyer. He has a good track record for helping launch the development of genre films such as Christopher Nolan’s Batman franchise, turning in drafts that get the projects rolling before they are handed off to another writer to develop certain things that the director would like strengthened.

Gareth Edwards, who made a splash with his indie-produced thriller Monsters, is set to direct the film, though the film has not been given a greenlight yet.

Via Hollywood Reporter.

If you’re a Godzilla fan who doesn’t own a blu-ray player, you might want to think about asking for one from Santa this Christmas. Confirming a rumor we first reported back in August, the Criterion Collection announced that it will be releasing the original 1955 Japanese monster movie classic Gojira, better known to those of us in the west as Godzilla, on January 24 on blu-ray.

The release will include a new, high-def digital restorations of both Ishiro Honda’s film and the 1956 American release of the film, Godzilla, King Of The Monsters. Gojira will feature the film’s original uncompressed monaural soundtrack. Both films will also have an audio commentary track from David Kalat, author of A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series.

The disc will also include the following extras –

• New interviews with actor Akira Takanada (Hideto Ogata), Godzilla performer Haruo Nakajima and effects technicians Yoshiro Irie and Eizo Kaimai.
• Interview with Godzilla composer Akira Ikufube.
• Featurette detailing Godzilla’s photographic effects.
• New interview with Japanese film critic Tadao Sato.
• The Unluckiest Dragon, an illustrated audio essay festuring historian Greg Pflugfelder describing the tragic fate of the fishing vessel Daigo fukurya maru, a real-life event that inspired Godzilla.
• New and improved English subtitle translations.
• Theatrical trailers.
• Booklet featuring an essay by critic J Hoberman.

Last week we told you that Criterion was working on a new blu-ray release for Ishiro Honda’s classic 1954 giant monster film Gojira, which would also include the 1956 Americanized version of the film, Godzilla, King Of The Monsters. Criterion had hinted that this release would include a newly restored version of Gojira made from from interpositive elements supplied by Toho Studios.

Gojira isn’t the only part of the release getting a restoration. Criterion will also be presenting a new restoration for Godzilla as well.

If you’re wondering what the difference between the two movies, it’s this- When Jewell Enterprises picked up the US distribution rights to Gojira from Japan’s Toho Studios, they hired director Terry O. Morse to shoot several scenes with actor Raymond Burr to cut into the film with the presumed intent of giving American audiences an American character to identify with.

Fast forward to the early 1980s when United Productions of America prepared a telecine transfer of Godzilla, they altered some of the opening and closing credits. It has been this version that has been available on home video and in syndicated television packages ever since.

While restoring some opening and closing credits cards seems like a small thing, Criterion was determined to get the Godzilla back to its original form. In doing so, right after last week’s announcement they reached out to collectors who might have some original 35mm elements to help in the reconstruction of the film. While film collectors can be a notoriously cagey bunch as they don’t want their prints confiscated by a studio which may have a legitimate claim of ownership, Criterion was able to locate a 35mm Fine-Grain Print of Godzilla.

So what is a Fine-Grain print? Technically, it is a print struck from either the camera negative or a duplicate negative using a film that has a low-contrast, extremely fine-grained emulsion. They are not meant for exhibition so much as they are for creating duplicate negatives.

Practically, it means that a transfer from this print will be markedly better than anything that has been available for decades. And that will be before it goes through Criterion’s restoration process.

Although criterion has a reputation as being a home video label that caters to the cineaste, its catalog is actually fairly democratic when it comes to the range of films. At times the label has offered such treats as Shorty Yeaworth’s The Blob, Michael Bay’s The Rock and Armageddon, Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits and Brazil and Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap. Certainly, all titles that aren’t necessarily associated with high art, although they all have various important aspects that make them noteworthy enough for inclusion in Criterion’s catalog.

And let’s face it. The original Gojira is an import film, even outside of its giant monster genre. And it is certainly exciting to see that Criterion is giving it the same meticulous attention it gives to the works of Jean-Luc Goddard or Akira Kurosawa.

Via The Good, The Bad And Godzilla