When it was announced that Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla reboot was set to mark the launch of a shared mythology based around some of the most legendary kaiju in cinema, there were a lot of people left rolling their eyes. After all, we’d seen countless studios try and use a successful movie as the springboard to building a cinematic universe overnight, and the vast majority of them had failed.
However, the MonsterVerse got off to a great start, with Kong: Skull Island sidestepping all of the pitfalls that many similar projects had fallen into. The references to the wider canon were largely restricted almost entirely to the Monarch agency, and as a period piece, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts was freed from the shackles of connective tissue, deciding that the best approach was to craft a $185 million thinly-veiled Vietnam metaphor where the enemy just happened to be a 100-foot tall ape.
It helped that Skull Island had assembled a phenomenal cast to sell the ridiculousness of the premise, while the action sequences provided plenty of blockbuster spectacle. A box office haul of $566 million showed that fans clearly got a kick out of it, too, and with subsequent installments Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong set in the present day, it looked as though the MonsterVerse was now a modern enterprise.
Of course, questions still remain over the franchise’s continued success given King of the Monster‘s relatively weak performance, but sources close to WGTC – the same ones who told us Justice League Dark and Green Lantern shows are coming to HBO Max – are saying that a Kong: Skull Island series is in the works for WB’s new streaming service. No casting has been revealed as of yet, and plot details remain scarce, but apparently, it’s starting to be developed behind the scenes and though there’s no guarantee that it’ll actually materialize, especially if Godzilla vs. Kong ends up being a bust, it’s certainly something that the studio seems keen to explore at this point in time.
Published: Jan 17, 2021 10:48 am