‘Godzilla x Kong’: How old is Godzilla?

Godzilla has been a pop culture icon for a long time now — in fact, it’s been 70 years since the monster first appeared on the big screen, and it’s been 10 years since the MonsterVerse kicked off as well. 

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire marks the fifth film entry in the Legendary Pictures MonsterVerse. This version of the monster first appeared in 2014’s Godzilla, and we’ve seen the beast return multiple times since then. The recent movies haven’t exactly delved into the origins of reptilian behemoth, but it’s likely it has a similar backstory to the original, being that the monster was some sort of prehistoric reptile that was exposed to nuclear radiation.

How old is Godzilla in Godzilla x Kong?

There isn’t actually an answer to this question in the MonsterVerse films, however, if we expand our search and include some of the supplementary material then we may get more of an idea regarding Godzilla’s age. A prequel book written in 2014 gives more of an insight about the species from which Godzilla descended. In the novel, titled, Godzilla: Awakening by Greg and Max Borenstein we learn more about the Titanus Gojira, a species of ancient reptile creatures that supposedly existed between 250 – 300 million years ago.

So that gives us an idea of how long ago members of the Gojira species were knocking about, but does that really tell us how old the titan actually is? Surely the Godzilla we see in the MonsterVerse can’t be from that period of time, right? If that really is the case, it would mean the kaiju we know and love was walking around on Pangea. I’m not saying it’s impossible for the titan to be that old, I’m just saying you have to admit, that’s a pretty unrealistic life-span, even for a 390 ft irradiated lizard.

In the years since the prequel book was released, certain elements from the story have been retconned with the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters TV series pretty much making it completely non-canon. Recently, Greg Keyes, writer of the King of the Monsters and Godzilla Vs. Kong novelizations came out and said that no-one at Legendary really buys the idea that the giant lizard is hundreds of millions of years old. His comments implied that Godzilla was much younger, somewhere between 2 and 5 million years old, according to Gojipedia.

To this day we still don’t have a straight answer, and we likely never will. Godzilla’s age isn’t ever explicitly given to us in any of the ever growing catalog of movies. Contradicting lore and continuity errors don’t exactly help either, with one source seemingly giving an answer and then another retconning it. So basically, Godzilla’s age could be anything between a few million and 250 million — it all depends on what you’d rather believe.