The Big Picture

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire continues the epic MonsterVerse saga with a mysterious threat from Hollow Earth.
Director Adam Wingard discusses the film’s groundbreaking monster POV storytelling and the potential for future installments.
Wingard hints at potential foes and plots for future MonsterVerse films while planting Easter eggs in the latest movie.

Perhaps it’s the wake of Oppenheimer, but something has Godzilla stirring in the waters of Hollywood. The titan is now an Oscar-winning monster with Godzilla Minus One, and with Legendary’s MonsterVerse, Adam Wingard’s sequel Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ushers in the next chapter. In this interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, the director and co-writer discusses the direction he’s taking this franchise in the future, from Godzilla Junior to Hollow Earth.

The New Empire is a direct follow-up to Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong (2021), which saw the two MonsterVerse titans clash, instigated by an unseen force. Now, Monarch, Kong, and Godzilla turn their attention to a mysterious signal calling from Hollow Earth. Something is lurking in the shadows of the subterranean world, and it’s going to take both monsters to protect our world as we know it. Godzilla x Kong explores the origins of these behemoth mysteries with Rebecca Hall (Resurrection), Brian Tyree Henry (Causeway), Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey), Kaylee Hottle (Godzilla vs. Kong), Fala Chen (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), and more.

Check out the full interview in the video above or in the transcript below to find out what Wingard has in store for future installments, how Elon Musk influenced Godzilla x Kong, what fans can expect from the upcoming Thundercats movie, and loads more.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Kong and the fearsome Godzilla face off against a colossal undiscovered threat hidden within our world, challenging their very existence – and our own.Release Date March 29, 2024 Runtime 1h 55m Writers Terry Rossio , Simon Barrett , Jeremy Slater Production Company Legendary Pictures

‘Thundercats’ Are on the Move! What to Expect from the Movie
Image via Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment

COLLIDER: Normally I save this question for the end, but because I am a fan, I need to ask it at the beginning, which is, I grew up on Thundercats. It means a lot to me. I’ve been waiting for someone in Hollywood to do this thing, so what can you tell people about the status?

ADAM WINGARD: Well, I was just talking with Simon [Barrett] about the script yesterday. We’re actively working on a draft right now, and it’s cruising forward. It’s super awesome. I’m really excited about it. Thundercats, in addition to working on that movie, that that film has a lot of inspiration within this Godzilla movie itself, not to bring it back around to this. Like, if you look at the shot, for instance, in the trailer where Kong is blocking Shimo’s breath with the ax, that’s like a direct reference to the opening credit sequence where Lion-O jumps in the frame and holds the sword in front of him. Even a lot of the ‘80s cartoons, a lot of that was a big, big influence, and specifically Thundercats and Masters of the Universe color palette-wise, for this movie.

What are you guys envisioning as like the tone of this? You can have a fun tone with Thundercats, but you could also play it really serious like this is life and death stakes.

WINGARD: Well, I think you have to have a little bit of both. You gotta take it seriously. In the cartoon, even though it was definitely for kids, the characters were in a fair amount of danger. I’m definitely still scarred from that one episode where Lion-O’s getting wrapped up in the mummy, the rope, and he’s in the temple. That really messed me up as a kid. But yeah, I think any good adaptation these days is you’ve got to say as true to the source material as possible. That’s what people really want, and that’s sort of our goal. I mean, if you’re doing something that’s beyond being a kid’s cartoon, obviously you have to raise the stakes. So, yeah, it’s got a little bit of both of that.

Related ‘Thundercats’ Movie: ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’s Adam Wingard to Direct and Co-Write the Script Wingard’s longtime collaborator Simon Barrett will work with him on the Warner Bros. project.

Do you think it could be your next project?

WINGARD: Could be. We’ll see.

I’ll leave you alone on that now. I appreciate you indulging.

WINGARD: I love talking about Thundercats. It’s all good with me.

Listen, I could do it longer but I think everyone at Warner Bros. is like, “No.”

WINGARD: [Laughs] Well, luckily that’s at Warner Bros., so they’re kind of like, “No, but alright.”

‘Godzilla x Kong’ Tells the Monsters’ Side of the Story

So what do you think would surprise Godzilla fans to learn about making a big-budget Godzilla movie like this?

WINGARD: My god, that’s a good question. I don’t know that I have a good answer for you because so much of the behind-the-scenes is so complicated. I don’t think people would understand half of what we deal with. These are very complicated movies to put together, and everything moves at slow motion because you can only move at the speed of animation. Shooting these films is the easiest part, everything else is difficult because it takes so long to develop.

But with that said, I mean, I’ve had such a great experience on this film. Making [Godzilla vs. Kong] really gave me the confidence and understanding of how to deal with fully big animated sequences and what can be pulled off in that. That’s the whole reason why I made this film in the first place is I wanted to do a movie that really leaned into something that I felt like I had never seen before in a monster film, which was a movie that really allowsthe monster POV to tell the story. The monsters themselves tell a lot of their own story in this film, and that was the draw for me. I wanted to do something groundbreaking. Even though you’ve seen hundreds of monster kaiju films before, I don’t think there’s ever been one that leans into allowing the monsters to tell their own story before like we do.

One of the things about this is you obviously have a budget, and each VFX shot costs a ridiculous sum of money. What did you learn on the last one that you took to this one in terms of where and when to spend resources? There’s so much cost on every shot.

WINGARD: One of the biggest things you learn when making a big tentpole Hollywood film is that a number almost doesn’t mean as much as what you do with it. At the end of the day, sometimes when movies have more money, it just means there’s gonna be more waste because everybody knows that there’s a parachute to bail them out, so they end up just kind of splattering paint against the wall. You look at the film and you’re like, “Well, this movie costs the same amount as this one, but why does this one look so much bigger?” And the reason for that is because they’re just not wasting as much.

So, having made a Godzilla vs. Kong, which up until then was by far the biggest movie I’d ever made, it gave me a better understanding. That type of budget is very abstract until you make it, but then you just realize the key to it really is knowing how not to waste the money and to put it all on the screen. For me, I just knew that leaning more into a film that was gonna be fully about the monsters, and in that regard, leaning more into the animated aspects of it, was something that could push that budget even further. I knew we weren’t necessarily getting more resources than we did in the last movie, but I knew we had to make a much bigger, more expansive film, and that’s exactly what we did. Somehow, we ended up with almost double the VFX shots that we had in the last one, but it was just because we were smarter with the way we did it.

I’ve spoken to a lot of directors, and they basically say that if you don’t change what you are planning on doing, you don’t have that many revisions, you can make the money go a lot further.

WINGARD: That’s very true. That’s one of the biggest keys, and that was one of the most important things that we did, as well. Those last minute changes, a lot of those are like the waste that I’m talking about. A lot of the major monster sequences in this film are very similar to the very first draft of the script that Terry Rossio wrote, and we stuck very, very true to that.

Adam Wingard Stakes His Claim in the MonsterVerse
“I have my vision for what I think based on my experience on Godzilla vs. Kong.”

One of the things about this franchise is that there’s a lot of, not cooks in the kitchen, but a lot of people that have to make decisions on what you can do because you have multiple studios and everything else. What is it like trying to figure out the movie you want to make while also appealing to Warner Bros. and Toho and all the people that have to say yes?

WINGARD: I’m very lucky because I’m a very collaborative filmmaker, so I understand the strengths of collaboration. Also, I’m a very empathetic person, so sometimes you, as a filmmaker, have to look at the movie from a producer’s perspective, and you have to say, “Well, if I was in their position, what would make them feel respected and heard, while at the same time, I have a very clear vision of something I wanna do?” Sometimes you see different ways of approaching something, and sometimes you’re right on the same page. At the end of the day, it’s really about just making sure that everybody feels heard, but at the end of the day, you have to follow your heart and your vision, and you can’t let that change up too much. But a lot of great ideas come from other people sometimes, and by that, I mean sometimes an animator might have a great idea, the prop guy might have a great idea, and then obviously producers have great ideas. I think there’s always this sort of “us versus them” sort of myth out there, and I think if you have good producers, it’s not like that even on a big movie like that. I’ve been very lucky with these films to collaborate with Mary Parent and Alex Garcia. They’re both fantastic producers, and both of them have been making these monster movies for a while.

I will say, when I came on Godzilla vs. Kong, I did have that sort of complex of feeling a bit like a guest to a franchise. Each film was always a different filmmaker, and I’m kind of standing on the shoulders of giants, literally and figuratively, when I’m making Godzilla vs. Kong. Even though I felt like I was able to persevere in that and make my own movie, it was really only when I got into this film that I felt like, “Okay, everybody really trusts me now. I have my vision for what I think based on my experience on Godzilla vs. Kong of where I can take this, and I have the confidence to do it.” So, in some ways I felt like I was able to put myself in this movie almost more than I have in any of my films since maybe The Guest. In a lot of ways, this is a very personal journey for me in this story, and having been in the MonsterVerse now for almost seven years, I feel real ownership on what’s going on, and that’s been a really fantastic feeling.

Forget Mars, Elon Musk Has His Eyes on Hollow Earth
Image via Netflix

Godzilla is very popular right now — you have Monarch [Legacy of Monsters], you have this, you have Godzilla Minus One. But one of the things I’m curious about is when you’re dealing with Hollow Earth and you’re introducing things down there, what sort of freedom do you get to explore? How much is there a bible? It seems like there’s more coming as long as this film performs.

WINGARD: We started this film a little bit before Monarch, and so Hollow Earth was sort of up for grabs. We did a little fly-through of it in the last movie and so we got a little taste of what it could be, but I was so excited to be able to revisit it and re-explore it in all these different ways. I remember when the last film came out, Elon Musk tweeted about the movie, and he called the movie “amazeballs,” I think, but one of his follow-up tweets is he was questioning where the light source in Hollow Earth was, which isn’t answered in the first film. And so, as a rebuttal to that, the very first shot of this movie answers the question of where the light source comes from in Hollow Earth, as a response to Elon Musk’s tweet. [Laughs] Hopefully he’ll appreciate that when he sees it.

Congrats, MonsterVerse! Godzilla Junior on the Horizon
Image via Toho

So, Kong gets a son, essentially, in this film. How long before Godzilla gets a son?

WINGARD: Hopefully soon. One of my favorite movies of the whole series is Godzilla vs. Destoroyah. That sequence when Junior dies and Godzilla kind of mourns over him, it’s just so upsetting. That’s such an emotional high for the series, one of my favorite moments, and so it’d be great to get a little bit more of a character that reflects Godzilla in his own way at some point here.

There is obviously an appetite for Godzilla and Kong and future stories. When you were making this, how much were you already thinking about planting seeds for where it can go, and how much is it sort of like you can really only do it one at a time?

WINGARD: Well, you never want to get too far ahead of yourselves, but at the end of the day, even when we’re shooting, I actually planted quite a few Easter eggs in this movie. Some are pretty on the nose that I think when the movie actually comes out and they’ll be able to freeze frame, they’ll get some hints of potential directions of things to come. We may not do post-credit scenes for these movies, but there are tee-ups to where we would go. I have some ideas about potential foes that might come up, and plots. So there’s some really fun, clever things I think we’ve done to set some things up.

Image via Warner Bros. 

I’m always fascinated by the editing process, so did you have a much longer first cut? Did you end up with a lot of deleted scenes?

WINGARD: I’m not a big long-first-cut type of director. My editor, Josh Schaeffer, and I have worked together two films in a row. GvK was our first and I just absolutely love working with Josh, and we really see eye-to-eye in terms of running time. We think about that a lot from the beginning, and so we try to aim within 15 minutes or so, 10 to 20 minutes, I guess at most, of the final running time. I think the editor’s cut for this film was, like, 2:08 or something. It wasn’t long, and that was by design. I mean, you can edit any movie into four hours if you want, so it’s not like we didn’t have enough material to do that, but right out the gate, we’re like, “Well, let’s not create any illusions to an unrealistic version of this film.” We knew that the movie was going to be about, or just under two hours and that’s what we geared towards from the beginning.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is in theaters now.

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