Jan de Bont almost directed a Godzilla movie in the '90s.

I remember hearing a few details about it. It would feature Godzilla fighting a shapeshifting alien called the Gryphon. The studio balked at the budget so it didn't go through. So they spend $130M to $150M for Roland Emmerich's 1998 movie which is one of my top guilty pleasures, I'll admit.

TEXT:

It wasn’t too big. I went to Japan, I met with the people at the studio, and they loved my version. It was basically that the visual effects at the time, and also special effects — like the way they did in the [original] Godzilla movies, which, I had copies of all of them — it became a battle about the budget. So the person who ended up doing the movie said that he could do it for like $40-50 million less than my budget. Mine was, I think, around $100 million or so. Of course, that never happens — and his film ended up costing almost twice as much as my budget. Unfortunately, they believed him.

But the writers I had were fantastic, the script was so good. It stayed true to the old Godzilla movies, but then taking place in the United States, which [the other movie] kept. But then they started by changing Godzilla! You cannot do that! After so many years, and everybody loving Godzilla, why would you want to change it? That was a big mistake. And then it became all about special effects, and that is never a good thing. I met some of the directors who did the earlier Godzilla movies — they were nice people, and the studio loved the take on it. We were really far into pre-production: set designs, locations, and then they saw the budget. “Oh no, we don’t spend that much money on the Godzilla movie.” Then they end up spending twice as much money.