“Everyone’s got a very strong opinion about Godzilla and what it should be," director Gareth Edwards told Empire earlier this year. And it seems that plenty of people are being given the opportunity to have their say: the news this morning is that Legendary's take on the atomic Japanese titan has just gained yet another writer{
Max Borenstein is the latest incumbent at the writing desk, and like his predecessor David Goyer (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight), he's got plenty of history with Legendary, having worked on the screenplays for the gestating Jimi Hendrix biopic, and The Seventh Son, the adaptation of Joseph Delaney's The Spook's Apprentice. There's also Art Of The Steal, which Warners are developing with Zac Efron.
The first writer we knew about, following the splash of early publicity announcing Legendary's scoring the Godzilla rights from Toho, was David Callaham, who wrote The Expendables and Doom. There were then reports of rewrites by Edwards himself when the Monsters director came aboard; presumably those will be ongoing, since he remains top dog. Goyer then arrived over the summer, but after a few months of musing it appears that all concerned still believe there's work to be done.
The project remains wrapped in secrecy, so there's still no real indication of what shape this new Godzilla will take, aside from Legendary's oft-repeated promise that they want to go the Batman route of updating but remaining true to the character's roots. Producer Brian Rogers also teased other monsters from the Godzilla pantheon last year.
But that initially-promised summer 2012 release date is now pretty definitively out. We're choosing to believe that Legendary and Edwards are trading momentum for quality: keen to get their Godzilla absolutely right, in the wake of Roland Emmerich's unloved 1998 version.