Trivia / Godzilla vs. Biollante

• Acclaimed Flop: Despite highly positive reviews from critics, the film just barely made its budget back and caused Toho to shift from the grittier tone and use of original monsters to more general sci-fi fare with established kaiju in later films.
• Colbert Bump: The song "Bio Wars" suddenly got a surge in interest around late 2021/early 2022 thanks to its use in the "Mr. Incredible becomes (un)canny" meme.
• Content Warnings: The official MPAA rating descriptor is PG for "traditional Godzilla violence."
• Contest Winner Cameo: The entire script, though it was changed so much only the following aspects were kept: the death of Dr. Shiragami's daughter, Biollante's creation, a psychic girl, and the general ending.
• Creator Breakdown: The double whammy of this and Gunhed both ending up as box office bombs caused long time Toho special effects director Koichi Kawakita to end up developing a drinking problem as he took the attendance failures of both movies personally. Thankfully, he would bounce back with the success of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah which even got him a Japanese Academy Award in special effects.
• Deleted Scene: A scene in the movie where Godzilla first approaches Biollante, she would retreat and release spores that grew flowers. Godzilla is surprisingly calmer looking than he actually is, even seeming to cry.
  • Biollante is also shown to indiscriminately kill a JSDF investigation squad in another. This was kept in the manga adaptation.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Blu-ray releases by Echo Bridge and Lionsgate have since gone long out of print and are now impossible to get at a good price.
  • Even before that, this was one of the few Godzilla movies that never made it onto DVD, even back in 2004-2007 when Godzilla DVDs were booming. It only got a VHS release by Mirimax in 1992...and that was the end of that. It wasn’t until 2012 when it finally got its due on both DVD and Blu-ray...which in itself lead to the above example.
• Recycled Script: Shinichiro Kobayashi, the script's writer, based it off one he wrote in high school for a script contest for the Ultra Series, which became Episode 34 of Return of Ultraman "The Life that Can't be Forgiven", which also features a plant-animal hybrid kaiju appearing in Lake Ashi and themes of science going too far.
• Troubled Production: A less serious version, but still there. After The Return of Godzilla, Tomoyuki Tanaka wanted a direct sequel to be made. However after hearing King Kong Lives bombing, he was cautious on how the series would be handled. Kazuki Omori, who became director of the film, had a Teeth-Clenched Teamwork relationship with him (he blamed Tanaka for the quality of the series in the 70's like Ishiro Honda did, but Honda is more respectful about it. Akira Ifukube on the other hand...). They both settled on making a contest with five entries, one mentioned below, and Omori then decided to modify the screenplay (which took 3 years) until the film became what it is.
  • On a more minor note, building and operating the Biollante puppets was extremely complex and difficult, requiring hours of set-up and 32 wires to move during filming. Visibility inside the costume was close to blind, making it hard to aim the head in the right direction when it sprayed its sap (which also permanently stained whatever it landed on). It didn't help that the Godzilla costume (while improving the weight and fit from the previous film) also had terrible visibility, meaning both suit actors could barely see during the fight scene, and filming was slow.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was originally written by Shinichiro Kobayashi (a dentist) and featured a far different story than what the film is today. The film was to focus heavily on Dr. Shiragami as he creates both Biollante and a rat/fish hybrid monster named "Deutalios" out of insanity due to his daughter Erica's death. Godzilla would've fought, killed, and eaten Deutalios (in graphic detail) and would've fought Biollante until retreating due to injuries. However it was felt that Godzilla was given very little focus in the story, and so re-writes were made to tone the violence down: replacing Deutalios (and his graphic death) with the Super-X2 and a rose form of Biollante, and Godzilla being injected with Anti-Nuclear Bacteria to slowly (but unsuccessfully) kill him.
  • In the script and or an earlier draft, Miki was supposed to psychokinetically levitate Godzilla, but Tomoyuki Tanaka apparently wasn't fond of the idea.
  • In another ending, a losing Biollante would have tried to kill Godzilla by turning into a wave of pure energy. This would be seen in Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!
  • One idea for Biollante's final design in the film was a flower with human face in the middle that talked.
  • A second earlier design for Biollante's final form would have featured a head similar to a flower, with four tooth-filled petals that opened and closed.
  • The first fight between Godzilla and Biollante was animated in stop-motion as a experiment, as the many moving parts of the Biollante prop were difficult to coordinate. However the shift from tokusatsu suits to animation was too jarring and it was too time consuming to apply stop motion to all the scenes to smooth it out so it was dropped completely.
  • Concept art exists of bizarre human/plant zombies that never made it into the film.