The ending of Godzilla vs. Kong was so undeniably epic, it almost hurts to imagine the idea of topping it for a sequel. Thankfully, for director Adam Wingard, that wasn’t what he wanted to do. Sure, he could’ve brought even more monsters onto the screen and made the action that much bigger. Instead though, for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, he had a new, riskier, idea.
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“The things that excite me about this film aren’t even the action—even though, as you know, we have tons of action in the movie,” Wingard told io9. “To me, it was being able to see the monsters just interact with each other in between the action scenes. [That] to me was more exciting. It’s almost like a character study, but with monsters.”
The idea came early on in the process when Wingard began to think about what a second film featuring Godzilla and Kong would be. “I never was like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to top Godzilla vs. Kong because I knew we were doing something special and different,” he said. “I knew right out of the gate that we weren’t copying ourselves because my emphasis was always on trying to break new ground … I wanted to do a movie that really leaned into the monster point of view. And so just by making that decision alone, I knew we were going to be doing things that we weren’t even able to do in the last film.”
For an example, Wingard points a the scene in the movie introducing the Scar King, one of the new big bads in the film. “The Scar King’s introduction in the movie is nearly eight minutes of just pure [creatures],” he said. “It’s almost like an animated sequence. There are no humans around. There’s no dialogue. It’s just the monsters leading the story. And knowing that that’s the trajectory we were headed in, it gave me that confidence that we’re taking you somewhere you haven’t been before.”
So if you want a movie where Godzilla and Kong don’t just fight a lot, but also shower and sleep (that’s not a joke), Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is in theaters March 29. We’ll have more from Wingard next week.
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