Despite being in a film called “Godzilla” (it was on the poster and everything), the creature from the 1998 film is officially known as “Zilla”. That’s because the creators of the OG Godzilla movies obtained rights to the creature and renamed it, citing that Sony had “removed the God from Godzilla“. In turn removing the word god from its name.
Confused, allow us to explain, basically when Sony’s rights to the Godzilla franchise expired, Toho decided to fix that abortion of the film when the rights reverted to them by stating that though the film was called Godzilla, the creature in it wasn’t actually Godzilla. In fact, just to make this distinction so clear it could be seen from space, in the film, Godzilla: Final Wars, in which the real Godzilla fights every enemy from his past, Zilla makes a brief appearance.
Brief being the operative word, since the fight is the shortest in Godzilla history, ending in just over 15 seconds. Just soak that in for a second, the 1998 Godzilla movie was so bad that the second the original creators of Godzilla had access to it, they had him blow to bits by the real Godzilla in a 15 second piece of film making so awesome children watching it grow chest hair on their god-damn eyeballs.
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