'Godzilla vs. Kong': The Movie That Saved The MonsterVerse
Upon the news that Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has amassed an opening weekend total of $194 million worldwide (against a budget of $135 million), the idea that the MonsterVerse of which the movie is a member was pretty much considered dead in the water just a few short years ago seems outlandish. Yet, weirdly enough, that was our reality.
In 2019, following successful-enough turns in Godzilla (2014) and Kong: Skull Island, Legendary Entertainment had the former’s quasi-sequel Godzilla: King of the Monsters slated for May 31. Bursting with star power such as Millie Bobby Brown and Vera Farmiga and releasing in the dead heat of summer, the film seemed like an easy success on the surface… and then it wasn’t.
Panned by the majority of critics and ignored by fans, Godzilla: KOTM sputtered out of the gate and died long before the finish line. The film, which cost a whopping $170 million to make (not counting marketing costs), made back a brutal domestic total of only $110 million, and an overall underwhelming $374 million worldwide. It came in as the worst performer on all counts in the cinematic universe by far, and went beyond threatening the MonsterVerse’s existence; to many, it killed it right then and there.
So, what happened? In short, Godzilla vs. Kong happened. Next in a carousel of artistic visionaries was Adam Wingard, helming what was widely assumed to be the premature finale for a franchise unfortunately misconceived. Coming in from all sides were arguments not only about Wingard, but about whether or not Gareth Edwards’ first film should’ve gotten a sequel at all, and worse, about how this all may have been a huge waste of time either way. But things changed when the first trailer released; the expectation that this was the last one wasn’t quite gone, but an undeniable excitement began to seep into fandoms and moviegoing audiences on the whole.
The trailer, currently sitting at 107M views on YouTube, opens on a scene of mass destruction, cleverly hiding the movie’s mechanical menace behind the smoke billowing from falling buildings. People run, scream, and cry as a pair of glowing red eyes creeps into the frame above them. Even if everybody else was ready to say goodbye to this iteration of monsters, Wingard clearly wasn’t. The now infamous trailer frames the titular battle like a pay-per-view boxing match, boasting teases at some of the film’s most earth-shattering visuals and bookending the mania with the tagline “One. Will. Fall.” It was on, to say the least.
What followed was a legitimate revival, and not only in the MonsterVerse. Godzilla vs. Kong was a bridge back to the cinema in 2021 following the pandemic, and even in that anemic market, it managed to handily out-gross KOTM with a hearty $470 million take-in. There was something so compelling in essence about returning to the movies for what truly felt like an event, as the trailers promised it would.
Wingard introduced fans and soon-to-be-fans to an almost slapstick sense of scale that hadn’t been seen in the universe up to that point. GvK is still more grounded than GxK, but also, there’s a scene in which Godzilla blows a hole through the center of the planet through which Kong climbs up before they duke it out in a neon-soaked Hong Kong. Something was different, and everybody knew it. The story feels as cosmetic as the visuals, yet there even exists a sort of satisfactory substance there, too.
A heavy focus is set on Kong’s connection to the human race, clouded by Godzilla’s new, seemingly random knack for destruction. While most of the film pits the two of them against one another, developing in the background is a subplot that eventually reveals Mechagodzilla; the robotic clone of Goji, much like the rest of this film, stands out in this cinematic universe. His angel is completely blind evil, so he’s both easy to pull against and impossible to misunderstand. His sheer mechanized force being the reason that Kong and Godzilla have to team up to take him down works well too, and raises the stakes and excitement tenfold.
The film has two final fights; the one in nighttime Hong Kong between Godzilla and Kong, and then in the same city, the two take down Mechagodzilla together after the sun rises, essentially immediately after the former brawl. It’s a half-hour of distilled manic energy that, in the end, convinced just about everybody that this franchise had the potential for something beyond what had been delivered to that point. This led directly to the boom that GxK is enjoying just a few years later; not just because it is a direct sequel to a movie that did well, but because it is the follow-up to the first movie in half a century to pit Godzilla and King Kong against one another. It’s almost a standalone genre of its own.
It was a risk for Wingard and the higher-ups to switch things up and take the road of over-the-top entertainment that exists solely to fulfill that goal, more so considering the semi-serious tone of the movies up to that point. Yet, it turned out to be exactly what the MonsterVerse needed. If he doesn’t already possess them, Adam Wingard needs the keys, the car, the house, really the whole shabang, to this universe. If GvK wasn’t enough, GxK, in its stylistic advancements and widespread success, should earn him the unrestricted access he deserves.
Looking back, it’s easy to see why GvK paid off but it’ll always be special to revisit that era for the MonsterVerse and movies as a whole. Adam Wingard permanently altered the landscape for monster movies and continues to set the blockbuster standard with every subsequent release, and it all goes back to Godzilla vs. Kong, and it likely will for a long time. Rewatch after rewatch, review after review, it stands tall as a wildly compelling success in all the crucial aspects. It’s a big, bold, beaming (sometimes literally) blockbuster of the sort that you want to be able to pull off your shelf on a whim. These are the kinds of movies that last forever.