We’ve been chomping at the bit to find out just what MONSTERS director Gareth Edwards has in store for the world’s most famous lizard (next to Kermit, natch) since he was tasked with the unenviably task of rebooting the franchise last year. 

With Sony ballsing it right up last time – with their oh-so-cheeky ‘Size Matters’ campaign and allowing Emmerich & Devlin anywhere near a copy of Final Draft in the first place – it was always going to be an difficult task for anyone to undertake; how does one make western audiences care again after such a fiasco?But Legendary Pictures (home of Nolan’s Dark Knight flicks amongst other quality product) saw something in Edwards’ directorial debut and gave him the keys to the property. We always hoped what they saw was the assured subtly he displayed in portraying a world partially ravaged by giant monsters… and not just the fact that it had giant monsters in it period. For this to really work surely they’ll have to take an almost polar opposite approach to Sony.

Well, we still won’t know for a while yet it seems, with shooting still a long ways off, but what has emerged however, is two rejected designs for Godzilla himself, courtesy of G-Fan magazine…

As you can see both designs are a lot more faithful to the original source (the first especially) than Patrick Tatopoulos’ work in the ’98 version, which, while functional, didn’t really capture the spirit of those wonderful man-in-suit days. It’s not clear why the designs were given a thumbs-down, but it is encouraging they’re at least looking at early Gojira for inspiration.

GODZILLA has a tentative release date of 2014, allowing plenty of time for us to campaign for the inclusion of this little fella…