Since Godzilla Minus One hit theaters earlier this month, it has already broken box office records for a live-action Japanese theatrical release in North America and been named one of the best movies of 2023. Amidst the latest kaiju movie finding success, Pacific Rim filmmaker Guillermo del Toro caught the movie and was inspired by its release to discuss his own experience trying to make a period genre film.
One standout aspect of Godzilla Minus One is its post-World War II setting, as it offers a more in-depth conversation about the fallout of nuclear war on Japan. Guillermo del Toro reflected one of this month’s 2023 new movie releases with these words:
A little memory: Watching the superb GODZILLA MINUS ONE, I was first impressed that It was a period piece. Necessarily so. I remembered my early days, when Mark Frost and I developed LIST OF 7 for Universal. When we presented it, they said - ‘But- this is Victorian…’ To which I, of course, agreed, and the said: ‘But shot in a modern way, with mood and great action!’ and received the reply: ‘People don't care for period pieces.’
On Twitter, del Toro shared that seeing Godzilla Minus One reminded him of a project of his that never came to be because Universal couldn’t get behind the fact that it was a period piece. The project he discusses specifically is The List of Seven, which would have been an adaptation of Mark Frost’s 1993 novel of the same name.
Del Toro was working with the author to develop the adaptation before it was cancelled. The novel takes place in 1884 and follows Sherlock Holmes writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as he is invited to a seance where two people were apparently murdered. As Del Toro continued:
To which I replied: ‘What about Raiders of the Lost Ark?’ They validated my parking. This was circa 1995 or so. My brave executives were Carr D'Angelo and Barry Josephson, I believe. Ah, so many good ones that will never get made… Barry and Carr both WHOLEHEARTEDLY supported the film - it was upper management that nixed it. I was being entirely unironic- We tried for years.
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Guillermo del Toro has not been shy in recent years about his range of experiences working with movie studios to get his projects made. Earlier this year, the filmmaker who famously made movies like The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth and Nightmare Alley shared that he still gets rejected to this day by studios, saying at the time that five of his ideas had just been rejected in the matter of two months. He called the moviemaking process “frustratingly difficult” and likened it to “eating a sandwich of shit.”
While del Toro spoke of being rejected regarding a period piece he wished he could have made nearly 30 years ago, it clearly comes at a time when a genre film that takes place in the past is proving studios wrong about how viable they can be. Guillermo del Toro is currently working on a few exciting projects, including his own version of Frankenstein and a stop-motion animated adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Godzilla Minus One continues to play in theaters.
