The world has Godzilla fever. The critically acclaimed new film Godzilla Minus One is being heralded as the best Godzilla movie in half a century or more, while people eagerly anticipate next year’s massive MonsterVerse sequel, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. Meanwhile, a new Apple TV+ series is tying up the loose ends in the MonsterVerse while creating an epic character-driven adventure. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters follows characters across decades and continents as titans and MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) change the way people view the world.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a large collaborative project between various production companies — Safehouse Pictures, Toho Co., Ltd., Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, and Legendary Television. Safehouse Pictures is the bi-coastal production company run by powerhouse producers Tory Tunnell and Joby Harold. Harold wrote and executive produced Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he also co-wrote Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, The Flash, and Army of the Dead. Right now, Safehouse is in post-production on the sci-fi actioner Atlas, starring Jennifer Lopez, Simu Liu, and Sterling K. Brown, which Brad Peyton directed for Netflix.

We spoke to Tunnell about Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, as well as Sean Konrad, a prolific visual effects artist who has either supervised or worked on the effects in the films Justice League, Godzilla (2014), and Deadpool 2, along with the TV series Ms. Marvel, Loki, and For All Mankind. Konrad also worked on the brilliant compositing for the underrated masterpiece Stay, starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts. Tunnell and Konrad spoke to MovieWeb about uniting the MonsterVerse in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and the significance of Godzilla.

Producing Monarch with Legendary Pictures and Others
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Release Date November 17, 2023 Cast Christopher Heyerdahl, Mari Yamamoto, Qyoko Kudo, Kurt Russell, Wyatt Russell Main Genre Action Seasons 1
MovieWeb: How and why did you get involved with the series? It’s such a massive epic and involves so many people and companies. Were you ever worried about how big of a challenge it would be for Safehouse Pictures?

Tory Tunnell: Well, my producing partner and husband, Joby Harold, and I were invited into the show when Matt Fraction was playing in the sandbox, and he identified that Monarch was the area he wanted to explore. And that was so exciting to us, because it was so smart to look at this organization —- if you’ve seen the films, then you sort of saw Monarch in the background and then become really prominent in the later films; how did that come to be, and who’s behind it? And it’s a great way for people that haven’t seen the films to come in on the ground floor and learn about this organization with them. We love the fact that, with the dual timelines, you get to really inform characters in past and present, and you offer a lot of mystery and a lot of questions that come to bear, and sort of spend time in this really juicy family dynamic.

Tory Tunnell: We are so proud of the fact that we’ve traveled the globe, and I think it makes for a really exciting globe-trotting adventure. Had I really thought about it, I probably would have panicked and said, “What am I doing? No, of course I shouldn’t be involved in the show.” Because it was a lot of challenges, but I think that it really worked because we had so many smart people, and really, when you work on these big shows, big films, when you’re working with the best of the best, it really comes together in an organic way. You’re doing all the math in prep, and if you do that math correctly — it’s work, but when you have a plan with anything in life, you can get it done.

MW: Legendary Pictures has done a great job turning Godzilla and King Kong into this blockbuster cinematic universe. How much did you work with them on this, and were there things they needed to insert in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters so that it fit in with the extended universe?

Tory Tunnell: I mean, we have such amazing resources with Legendary, who have really mined the IP with Toho for over a decade, and they’re such great partners. They have a mythology manager who really helped keep us in check along with Toho. We would always make sure that we’re doing things that are respecting canon, because it’s so important to do that, but also stretching where we could go so that it keeps it fresh and keeps it exciting.

Tory Tunnell on the Monsters of Monarch

MW: Godzilla used to represent the atomic age, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, war, and post-war imperialism. Today, and in this series, the monsters seem to carry different sorts of meanings. Godzilla can be a Rorschach test and mean anything, but I really see parallels between the monsters and their havoc on the world here with climate change and COVID. Is that fair to say?

Tory Tunnell: Thank you for saying that, because that’s often the soundbite that I’m providing, which is the climate change and the COVID piece of it. But I think that good genre has always been a great way to give us a real reflection of society in a way that is entertaining and not too hard-nosed, not too in-your-face. And I think adult Godzilla has always been emblematic of that opportunity, where we’ve always been able to see a force that we are scared of, but we can survive together, and we can come out alive as humans and maybe better for it.

Tory Tunnell: I think what’s really exciting about our show is, as you know, the word ‘legacy’ comes up in our title. We talked a lot about how hurt people hurt people, and the monster in your life, in our show, might be the 3000-foot monster in front of you or might be the person sitting to your left. And I think that being able to talk about that over dual storylines, we really get to see how people change and how people evolve and how some people become monsters or some people shed their capacity to be a monster, and also in our show, how they literally confront real monsters. And so I think having that span of time allows us to fully flesh out a lot of those themes.

The MonsterVerse Over the Years

MW: You’ve seen Godzilla evolve over a long period of time, but also the evolution of design, technology, and effects in the MonsterVerse. How do you think it’s changed or how different does it look now, 10 years later?

Sean Konrad: One of the cool things about the MonsterVerse is that every movie kind of feels distinct, almost distinct as a genre piece. Kong: Skull Island is like this adventure movie, it has this humor that we don’t necessarily see in Godzilla 2014. And Godzilla 2014 has like a real question of existential fear and those aspects of the human condition. It’s really concerned with those things.

Sean Konrad: And what I think is really interesting about the show is that it kind of does it all. We start with a scene, basically from Kong: Skull Island, where we go through this big action scene, and then we get back to a scene that happened in Godzilla 2014. And then you kind of transition into something that feels unique. It’s like this globe-spanning adventure, but it is also serious and weighted in a way that the rest of the movies before it had been. How Matt Shakman managed to make that work is kind of a magic trick. It’s something that I don’t fully understand, but I thought he did an enormously good job with it.

RELATED: Matt Shakman on Directing Godzilla in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

MW: Yeah, it’s like a MonsterVerse mixtape, but also a cogent emotional story. It’s so character-driven, with these people across continents and decades. The monster action scenes and the effects almost have a kind of emotional parallel with the characters; the genre stuff seems to be a manifestation of what they are going through. Was that intentional? Were you designing the sequences in relation to their emotional arcs in some ways?

Sean Konrad: Yeah, 100%. I mean, that was one of the things that really drew me to the project initially. If you’re going to do Godzilla on a TV screen, you don’t do the really dull thing of like servicing eight and a half hours (or whatever the total runtime is) of visual effects. You use that budget in a different way. And that means that the set pieces are driven by the emotional arcs of the characters, and then if you do it right, then the monsters become a reflection of the fears of the characters in the moment. And that’s a thing that we really strove for — what is the worst thing that could happen in this moment to these people?

The Legacy of Godzilla

MW: How do you see Monarch: Legacy of Monsters continuing the very real legacy of Godzilla?

Tory Tunnell: I think that Godzilla is one of those characters that, as a kid, you never really remember meeting or being introduced to. He’s always been like Santa Claus. He’s just part of the world in the culture. And I think that’s what’s been so exciting for us to be able to step into that ring and work with Godzilla, because he’s someone that continues to be a reflection of society, and that keeps on changing. And so I think he’s always been a dynamic kaiju to contend with, because I think that he is so representative of the human condition.

Tory Tunnell: And I think that what’s also always been so interesting is that people who don’t really know Godzilla sort of assume that he’s the bad guy. And he’s much more complex than that. I think it’s always so dynamic that he’s someone that, you know, he’s gonna destroy some buildings, and no one’s gonna lie about that. But he’s also going to protect us by navigating our safety from other titans, and he’s someone that we revere and we don’t fully understand. And there’s so much about that, but I think it’s always been a match for human wonder and awe, and certainly the characters in our story reconcile that as well.

Related: All Godzilla Films Ranked

Sean Konrad: Godzilla, through the course of these shows, is kind of a hero, but a hero in the way that, like, he looks at humanity like an elephant regards an axe, It doesn’t understand what we’re doing, but it’s trying to defend and protect the planet, right? So it’s a force of nature. And the rest of the monsters, I think, turn into more of what our characters are fearing, rather than it being like some particular existential thing that we’re trying to talk about.

MW: Do you think the MonsterVerse has room for a second season of the show, or do you think you and Safehouse Pictures would want to be involved in the franchise some more moving forward?

Tory Tunnell: I mean, we are so happy about the show we created. We cannot wait for people to see it. If enough people see it, then we’ll really be able to have those conversations in a real way.

So let’s watch Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and let the conversations begin. The series airs every Friday through January 12 on Apple TV+. You can find a link to stream the show below, and check out our video interview with the series’ creators, Chris Black and Matt Fraction.

Stream on Apple TV+