The 8 Best Godzilla Rip-Offs of the 21st Century, Ranked
Two years after beating both the MCU (Guardians Vol. 3) and Tom Cruise (Dead Reckoning Part 1) to win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, everyone’s favourite cinematic Kaiju has returned to the world’s biggest screens this month in Godzilla Minus Zero.
Set in 1949, two years after the events of Minus One, Godzilla Minus Zero sees the ginormous, atomic era creature face off against a rampaging, flying dragon named Ghidorah. Filmed for IMAX, the movie has already wowed audiences at both the New York and London Film Festivals en route to its general release. If you’re already pumped to see it or are looking to stay in that Kaiju world for a little longer after watching it, the last quarter century of movies has provided more than a few that’ve borrowed liberally from Japan’s biggest (and we mean that literally) gift to cinema.
In the list below, you’ll find the eight best Godzilla rip offs of the 21st Century so far — a group that runs the gamut from arthouse and horror to animated and superhero movies to plain, old, big, dumb blockbusters — ranked in ascending order from first to last. Read on for more on each of them.
Written by Drew Goddard (Cabin in the Woods) and directed by Matt Reeves (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) under the genre-shrewd eye of producer J.J. Abrams, 2008’s Cloverfield is still the best non-Godzilla Godzilla movie we’ve had the pleasure of seeing in the last 25 years.
A sci-fi blockbuster modelled on a found footage horror movie, this New York-set tale of gigantic, alien, arachnid invasion is an air-tight, blissfully lore-free, and often quite horrifying journey that zips through its 85-minute runtime without stopping to take a breath.
For those old enough to remember, seeing the trailer for Cloverfield in theatres at the time was an unforgettable experience (a world that seemed to just arrive fully formed) and the resulting movie thankfully lived up to the hype. It has since spawned two wildly varied sequels, but the original still towers above.
Bong Joon-ho made his name with the Fincherian crime movie Memories of Murder, but The Host — a weirdly prescient, Seoul-set, 2006 monster smash — confirmed his ability to make big scale movies with real political and sociological bite to them. If you’re a fan of both Godzilla and Parasite, you owe it to yourself to go back and check it out.
The Host stars Bong’s muse, Song Kang-ho, as a kiosk owner whose daughter is abducted by a giant creature that emerges from the Han river. Bong returned to the creature feature with 2017’s more benevolent and heart-wrenching Okja, but for grizzly, Godzilla-like destruction and pure, propulsive storytelling, The Host is hard to beat.
Keeping things in the Korean capital but with an even more darkly comedic tone is 2016’s Colossal, a strangely under-seen movie in which Anne "Mother" Hathaway plays a depressed and boozy writer who somehow manages to manifest a giant, destructive creature that she’s able to remotely control.
This is a Godzilla rip-off movie that liberally and playfully mixes genres and tones (Hathaway herself compared it to Being John Malkovich) to create something daring and unique. Unfortunately, the movie didn’t fare too well at the box-office in spite of strong reviews — in other words, it's a movie begging to be rediscovered.
If you’re looking for a Godzilla rip-off that’s stupidly enormous, enormously stupid and has The Rock in it, look no further than 2018’s Rampage. The movie is an adaptation of the popular ‘80s arcade game in which players got to control one of three giant creatures whose sole purpose in life was to tear down large buildings — but of course, the 1986 original was itself inspired by Godzilla's own famously destructive tendencies.
In the movie version, the action is moved to Chicago, where The Rock plays a man who is both an ex-special forces soldier and an anti-poaching guy — because why the hell not? Working with his giant ape friend, George, he attempts to stop Lizzie (a giant lizard) and Ralph (a giant wolf) from destroying every building in poor old Chi-town.
Of all the blockbuster directors to emerge in the last 25 years, Gareth Edwards might be the most perplexing. This is a guy with a generational ability to suggest scale, and who has made significant additions to both the Star Wars and Jurassic Park universes while still finding the time to make a criminally undervalued sci-fi movie of his own, The Creator, yet he still struggles to populate his movies with characters who feel like real human beings.
All of those tendencies, for better and worse, are present and accounted for in Monsters, his breakout sci-fi debut — a movie that he somehow managed to produce on a budget of $500,000. The story focuses on a young man and woman who are attempting to make their way through an “infected zone” around the U.S. border to Mexico, where giant, tentacled, alien creatures now roam. For Godzilla fans in the mood for a slightly more ruminative creature feature — think more Last of Us than Rampage — this is the one to watch.
If Turning Red wasn’t on your radar when Pixar made the odd decision to release it directly to streaming in 2022, I’d highly recommend giving it a watch. One of the best original movies the celebrated animation studio has released in the last decade, it follows a 13-year-old girl who learns that puberty for the women in her family means turning into a giant red panda whenever you get worked up — one need not read too much between the lines to understand what director Domee Shi is getting at here.
Like so many of the studio’s offerings, Turning Red is an unmitigated delight, but there’s a cultural specificity to it (it’s set in the Chinese-Canadian community in Toronto, where Shi, the director of the beloved short film Bao, grew up) that helps it to stand out from the pack. Best of all, it climaxes with a surprisingly epic Kaiju sequence that should delight any watching Godzilla fan.
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After proving his abilities as both a deft hand at superhero movies (Blade II, Hellboy) and a bona fide master of horror (Pan’s Labyrinth), Guillermo del Toro got to live out one of his fantasies by making his very own Kaiju movie called Pacific Rim.
Set in the not-too-distant future, after a hole has opened at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean allowing a group of giant sea monsters loose, the movie follows an elite group of "pilots" whose job it is to operate ginormous mech warriors called Jaegars that have been built by the military to keep coastal cities safe. If you’re looking for a Godzilla rip-off that doesn’t skimp on action or scale, this is the one for you.
As a bonus, Idris Elba and Charlie Hunnam lead the starry ensemble cast.
We’ll wrap this list up with one of the most under-appreciated movies in the MCU. Chemistry between the actors might be lacking at points, but The Fantastic Four: First Steps has style, personality and bags of heart — a movie which owes about as much to The Incredibles as that Pixar classic owed to the original Jack Kirby comics.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, the story goes down on a different Earth to our own, a world that looks quite 1960s, though the retro futurist gizmos have allowed humans to explore much further into space than we have. The real drama kicks off with the arrival of the Silver Surfer and, much later on, the massive, world-eating Galactus — allowing for the most Godzilla-coded sequence (slow approach from the ocean, giant stomping feet, crumbling skyscrapers etc.) that the MCU has produced thus far.
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