Details

Release year: 1997

Storyline

A homicide detective and an anthropologist try to destroy a South American lizard-like God, who's on a people eating rampage in a Chicago museum.

Top credits

Directors

Peter Hyams

Writers

Cast

Penelope Ann Miller — Dr. Margo Green
Tom Sizemore — Lt. Vincent D'Agosta
Linda Hunt — Dr. Ann Cuthbert
James Whitmore — Dr. Albert Frock

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Did you know

• Because the novel portrayed the museum's administration in an unflattering light, they turned the film's producers down. Paramount Pictures offered the museum a seven-figure sum of money to film there, but the administration was worried that the monster movie would scare kids away from the museum. The producers were faced with a problem as only museums in Chicago and Washington, D.C., resembled the one in New York. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago loved the premise and allowed them to shoot there.

• Creating a creature that had not been seen before was a great challenge for the studio. Based on the sketchy description in the original novel by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, lead concept artist Mark "Crash" McCreery made a number of Kothoga designs and director Peter Hyams chose his favorite one. The final design had a spider-like head and a fifteen-foot-long body that was an amalgam of a lion, an alligator, and a horse, detailed with reptilian scales and tufts of hair down the spine.

• The movie was originally projected to be a box office bomb due to the movie having no stars and the success of films like Scream (1996) dominating the box office. On opening weekend the movie performed five times higher than originally expected.