Out of all the cinematic universes that sprang up in the wake of Marvel’s unprecedented success, Legendary’s MonsterVerse seemed to be faring better than much of the competition. The franchise was retroactively created following Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla in 2014, with Kong: Skull Island’s status as a prequel allowing the story to fit some of the narrative building blocks in place in order to eventually build to super-sized smackdown Godzilla vs. Kong.
The first two installments yielded virtually identical critical and commercial results, with both sitting on a 75% Rotten Tomatoes score and a rating of 62 on Metacritic, although Skull Island’s $566.7m box office haul was marginally higher than Godzilla’s $525m. However, the most recent entry, Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, slowed the MonsterVerse’s momentum somewhat after earning tepid reviews and failing to crack $400m globally.
There had been rumors that the relative disappointment that greeted King of the Monsters could have a knock-on effect towards Godzilla vs. Kong, and it looks like there may be some merit to these reports, as it was recently announced that the kaiju blockbuster has been pushed back eight months, and is now set to be released in December 2020 as opposed to the March opening that was originally announced.
Little information is available about the movie at all, bar the incredibly vague official synopsis, along with promises from the studio that the face-off will deliver exactly what the fans want, so perhaps this news doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The entire franchise seems to have been created specifically to deliver Godzilla vs. Kong, with the filmmakers expected to work backwards from there in cracking the story, so it seems likely that there could be extensive reshoots ahead before the movie is ready to be released.
