What’s old is new again, time is a flat circle, and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire looks set to continue Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse franchise deeper into a world of city-sized cage matches like the post-1954 Godzilla movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s.
You can’t have a monster-of-the-week battle without a monster of the week, and this week’s monster is fresh. He’s new. He’s the monkey-fraggin’ Titan who’s beggin’ for a bitin’. More than any of that, he’s assuredly not just a mashup of words that a hungover screenwriter came up with while staring at a copy of Simba’s Pride on Blu-ray. Ladies and gentlemen, he’s the Skar King,
Based on the first trailer for Godzilla x Kong, eagle-eyed viewers can glean a few choice facts about this latest kaiju menace. Skar King is a little nasty guy. Whereas Kong is a giant gorilla and Godzilla is a giant shrug, Skar King is a big old orangutan. Unfortunately, this means that he can probably be expected to use very large sticks to pull enormous termites out of the ground, which feels like the last thing that people in the MonsterVerse need.
What’s this Skar King’s deal, anyway?
The brief glimpses that we’ve seen of Kong’s latest adversary paint a grim picture for newly-minted friends – and, in a perfect world, soon-to-be-lovers – Godzilla and Kong. Skar King displays the “early days of Planet of the Apes” intelligence necessary to not only remove the spine from a fellow giant monster, but also deem it fashionable enough to wear as a jaunty accessory. This implies either an incredible level of fine dexterity, or the existence of a Big and Really Really Tall Store in the subterranean kingdom that time forgot.
Maybe his most intriguing feature: Skar King is briefly shown to have faintly glowing blue eyes. Whether this is a stylistic choice or a hint that we’ll be seeing dueling atomic breaths in the new movie is yet to be determined, but Godzilla-adjacent nuclear halitosis would certainly go a long way toward explaining how the new antagonist managed to slaughter a whole mess of Kong’s relatives, as seen in the film’s first trailer.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is currently slated for release April 12, 2024, assuming that release dates for Warner Bros. tentpole pictures are genuine and not just aspirational thinking on the part of the studio. In the meantime, fans of monster mashes are encouraged to check out Toho’s Godzilla Minus One, the reimagining of the iconic kaiju’s origin story that’s currently thrashing box office expectations through the simple art of being completely metal.