Seeing as Warner Bros. has distributed the four installments in the MonsterVerse and reaped those $1.95 billion box office rewards as a result, you’d be forgiven for thinking that upcoming TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters will be streaming on Max. Except, it isn’t.
In a move that saw the studio widely mocked and roundly trashed, production company and rights-holders Legendary instead decided to set up the show with Apple TV, ensuring that the film and television projects existing within the same mythology are set up at direct rivals.The good news is that the first look is suitably epic, and those rumors we’ve been hearing about for months are unequivocally true; father and son duo Kurt and Wyatt Russell will be playing the same character, separated by decades due to the timeline-hopping nature of the story.
Picking up in the modern day, the narrative finds two siblings following in their old man’s footsteps to uncover their familial ties to the titular organization that’s basically the S.H.I.E.L.D. of the MonsterVerse. Lee Shaw will be played by both Wyatt and Kurt, with the action flitting between the 1950s and the present day.
10 episodes is a hefty order for a series that’s bound to be vastly expensive to begin with give the huge amount of visual effects required to bring the Titans to life, but at least there was an option available to the creative team so they didn’t have to splurge an additional fortune on de-aging Kurt Russell, even though Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 managed to do a stellar job of it more than half a decade ago.
You’ve got to wonder what Warner Bros. makes of Legacy of Monsters streaming on Apple TV when Adam Wingard’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is coming to theaters in March of next year, but Legendary won’t care in the slightest when it’ll realistically be laughing all the way to the bank.