It’s been a long time coming, but with less than nine weeks to go until Godzilla vs. Kong arrives on the big screen and HBO Max on March 26th, the first trailer for the next installment of Warner Bros. and Legendary’s MonsterVerse has arrived.
Even by the standards of the COVID-19 era, Adam Wingard’s blockbuster has faced a rocky road to release. A poor test screening led to extensive reshoots, with the clash of the Titans being shuffled around the calendar multiple times, only for Legendary to threaten WarnerMedia with legal action when the movie was announced for HBO Max shortly after the production company had been blocked from selling the distribution rights to Netflix.
Throughout it all, fans were wondering when they’d get to see the first footage from a film that wrapped all the way back in April 2019, and those calls only intensified when Godzilla vs. Kong was most recently bumped forward two months from May. Now that the first trailer is finally here, though, we’ve got a taste of what Wingard has in store for the two iconic kaiju.
It certainly looks epic in scale, but that’s never been the issue with the MonsterVerse, whereas the human characters have always tended be paper thin and one-dimensional, giving audiences very little to invest in when there aren’t hulking CGI creatures knocking seven shades out of each other. That being said, the project boasts an impressively stacked roster of talent, and hopefully the storyline matches the spectacle.
Under normal circumstances, a box office haul under $500 million would be viewed as a major disappointment, but these are different times we live in and we’ll just have to wait and see how Godzilla vs. Kong plays internationally and on streaming in the current climate before the studio announces the future of the shared universe.