Will new Godzilla movie bring Meg up from the depths?

Updated on April 7, 2010 By Ken Begg 9 Comments

Steve Alten’s awful series of ‘Meg’ novels, about a family of gigantic, prehistoric Megalodon sharks popping up in the modern age, has been mired in the Marianas Trench of development hell since about 1997.  If that date sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because that’s when TriStar’s Godzilla project was looming as possibly the biggest movie of 1998.  When that film underperformed (purely because it sucked), development on the film version of Meg ran aground.

The project regained vitality when Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake was looming as possibly the biggest film of 2005.  What that film underperformed (probably because it underwhelmed and was entirely too long), chances of a Meg movie again sank beneath the waves.  Then back in 2007 there was another burst of interest, but again it was short-lived.

Now Warners / Legendary Pictures are again working on another, hopefully truer and less sucktacular remake of Godzilla.  Assuming they don’t screw the giant radioactive lizard again, this might finally, maybe, be the giant monster movie that hits it really big.  If so, I can only imagine we’ll be hearing about that Meg flick sooner rather than later.  I also imagine it couldn’t hurt if the Piranha 3-D movie later this year does well.

Several DTV Megalodon movies have made in the last decade, all of them (Megalodon, Shark Attack III, Shark Hunter, Shark Attack in the Mediterranean, Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus) were pretty lame to terrible, although I actually kind of liked Megalodon.  Collectively, they were also little seen, so there’s plenty of room for a big screen and big budget version.  And to be fair, Alten’s first book could work as a decent template for a film, as it is basically a strung together bunch of “scenes that would be cool in a giant shark movie.”  It’s really the later books, when he’d exhausted those scenarios, that really, truly, laughably suck.  (Although the similar book Extinct by Charles Wilson is actually fairly decent.)

Meanwhile, the guy who directed Snakes on a Plane and Final Destination is currently working on Shark Night 3-D.   This is being hailed as “Jaws for the 3-D generation,” apparently by people who forget that a) there already was a 3-D, actual Jaws movie, and b) that Jaws is a truly great film that they have no hope in hell of touching quality-wise with a ten foot pole.  Still, 3-D sharks.  I’d go see that.

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  • fish eye no miko

    Jaws for the 3-D generation

    Am I the only one who’s kind of underwhelmed by the current 3-D craze. The two movies I recently watched in 3-D (Avatar and How to Train Your Dragon) were ok, but I think I they would have been just fine in 2-D (in fact, I plan to go see Dragon again, and I’ll probably just go to a 2-D showing). Granted, the cheesy “everything jumps out at you” thing some 3-D films do (often horror films, I’m guessing) is… well, cheesy; but it seems like there should be a happy medium somewhere.

  • Rock Baker

    The only recent 3-D flick I’ve seen was the update of My Bloody Valentine, by virtue of an actual 3-D DVD release. Yeah, it was cheesy, but it had showmanship! That’s something I really miss, showmanship. It also helped that the script was much better than I expected. I’d love to see a 3-D killer shark movie, but I don’t expect another Hollywood movie to deliver a My Bloody Valentine-like burst of actual entertainment value.
    I really did go for directing the Godzilla movie, but I’m not shocked that I was snubbed. As someone involved in comic books featuring giant characters I thought I had an edge. Guess not.
    What killed the 2005 Kong for me was two things. A) they took Carl Denham, my childhood hero, and turned him into a psycho (it’d be like making Dr. Quest a super-villian, just wrong) and B) they took the very worst element of the 76 Kong and brought it over, that being the ‘love’ Ann developes for Kong when she should be terrified of him. Building the new version around the original story didn’t help at all, it sort of begs you to compare it to a far superior film.

  • The Rev. D.D.

    The second “Meg” book is indeed awful. I think the third one could make a good B-movie, though, with the X-TREEM!! surfers and the character who returns as a Bond villain wannabe and such.

    I saw “Extinct” in a grocery store in college, but didn’t pick it up. Maybe I should have, if Ken says it’s “decent.” Is it better than the Meg books?

    I, too, would see a 3-D shark movie, albeit I might wait until it was on DVD.

  • Oh, yeah, Extinct is much better than Alten’s stuff. (And you’re right, the second book, The Trench, is particularly awful.) I’m not saying it’s a great book, but it’s pretty exactly what you want from a Megalodon shark novel.

  • I’ll pretty much see anything with a giant monster in it, so long as the monster gets more than a few seconds of screen time. The great mystery to me is why a 100 foot shark is more scary than a 12 foot shark. I mean, it’s not like any human short of Tarzan has a chance against the latter. (And even Tarzan only survives via script immunity.)

  • I asked that question because about making the Jaws sharks ever larger; to wit, on a personal level, how is a 40 foot shark scarier than a 25 foot shark. Answer, not much.

    The advantage of a 100 foot shark is that it is, indeed, a Giant Monster, and can do Giant Monster-ish things, like attack boats and such.

  • Rock Baker

    Yes, a giant shark could derail the customary train if the track ran across a bridge at the bay. But, sometimes ‘giant-huge’ big isn’t as horrific as ‘just’ big. For some reason I find the thought of a coffee table-sized tarantula to be far more unnerving than one the size of a barn.

  • The Rev. D.D.

    You know, Ken, that “giant monsters do giant monster things” you mentioned…it occurs to me that not a lot of that happens in the Meg books, unless I’m misremembering. A helicopter goes down in the third one, and an underwater base is destroyed in the second (although I think the other critters did that, not the shark), and probably a boat or two I’m not recalling, but it’s mostly people getting eaten.

    Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus may not have been everything I dreamed of, but dammit, at least they ate jets and bridges and such.

  • sandra

    When I saw the headline, my first thought was that you were referring to Meg Ryan :-D