Spoilers Godzilla: King of the Monsters - Review and Discussion Thread

I wonder what the reaction would be if one could take this movie back in time to 1998 and show it to Toho after they walked out of the Emmerich movie.

 

You know, given the often ribald nature of "Monster Island Buddies" segments upon YouTube, I have a sneaking suspicion how the creator will deal with the stinger Mothra now possesses. It would be even more perversely funny when one is aware Rodan and Mothra are a "married" couple in those comedy shorts.

 

Considering (in the film) Mothra gave Godzilla TWO 'Rainbow Showers'...

 

Has anyone heard or read about Toho's reaction to the movie? Supposedly (I honestly don't know), representatives for the studio left before a showing of the '98 film concluded, but were more "receptive" of the 2014 film. Given this film has even more elements resembling those of the Showa and Heisei eras, I'd like to believe Toho approves and may be willing to extend the license, allowing Legendary and Warner Bros. to produce additional films beyond "Godzilla vs. Kong".

Of course, the critical deciding factor will be the box office returns.

 

I haven't heard their reaction, but considering how respectful the movie is to Godzilla's past I imagine they would be happy with it. Since they've announced plans to make their own live-action films again, would they extend the license? I've heard that they aren't allowed to both have movies going at the same time, but since 2014 they've produced Shin and the anime trilogy.

 

The way I heard it, they're not allowed to release a (live action) movie in the same year as a Legendary Godzilla film. A different year is fine.

But Toho seemingly is looking to get more mileage out of the Big G again, so that limitation combined with potentially disappointing box office for the remaining Legendary films could be enough for them to not renew the deal.

 

The rumor I heard, seeing how Toho reinvested into their Hollywood offices, that they'd seek to renegotiate a new deal with Legendary (the original deal is over with "Godzilla vs Kong", anyway) to have Legendary produce more movies with the Toho monsters, but Toho would be more involved. Box office allowing, obviously. The way the box office for KotM looks right now, they might just go back to making their own movies and use their Hollywood people to shop them around for international streaming rights.

 

True, he was a great character but I liked the idea of Dr Serizawa sacrificing himself to save Godzilla when in the first film Dr Serizawa sacrifices himself to destroy Godzilla.

 

The monsters - sorry, Titans - were terrific! In particular, Ghidorah stole the movie: maybe the best and scariest CGI monster I've seen to date in theaters. I mean, Smaug was great (the Hobbit movies less so), but having a creature like Monster Zero in our world somehow made him so much more real and scary. He was so frickin' big!

That whole Antarctic sequence of his rebirth and fight with Godzilla was such a fantastic scene! Even the people weren't too bad, but it would have been so much better if the trailers hadn't spoiled Emma Russell's motivations.

 

The movie is a bomb in the USA, there is no way I see the series continuing unless Godzilla Vs King Kong is a MASSIVE hit.

 

Well perhaps having the two most famous monsters in movie history will help. The original King Kong vs Godzilla is still the most successful movie in the Toho series.

 

The thing is, even if "Godzilla vs. Kong" is a hit, Legendary will have to think twice about continuing. If you need the two biggest stars of the genre to get a hit, you can't build a franchise on it, because you can't have them face off that often while keeping the audience interested. The deal with Toho is done with "Godzilla vs. Kong", so to continue they'd have to renegotiate the deal. Toho has already signalled they'd be ready to make another deal, but that they'd want more involvement. It pains me, because I love this movie, but I just can't see how Legendary could do such a deal, and I don't see Toho being willing to invest highly into a partnership with a franchise that is demanding budgets which are simply unwarranted considering the return.

At this point, I've pretty much given up hope of a continuation of Legendary's MonsterVerse beyond next year, and instead hope for Toho to do a deal with Netflix to make their own new series of Kaiju movies with a secured international distribution.

 

I'd be down for that as long as they're better than the animated movies.

 

Netflix probably didn't know what they were getting when they bought the international distribution rights for the anime trilogy. Considering how bad they were received, Netflix probably would want more traditional Godzilla movies in order to accept a new deal. And considering the lackluster performance of the trilogy at the Japanese box office, Toho would most probably agree.

 

I know we're talking about a hypothetical situation, but what would actually be a great fit for Netflix would be Dougherty's Godzilla B.C. idea. I cannot see such a movie doing well at the box office but would probably get a lot of attention as a Netflix movie.

 

As much as I'd love to see it, I doubt that they could do such a movie on a budget that Netflix would be willing to do. "Outlaw King" might be the most expensive Netflix Original Film so far, at $ 120 million, Godzilla B.C. would have to seriously cut corners to go even that low. "The Highwaymen" was $ 49 million, "Rim of the World" less than $ 20 million.

True, "The Irishman" is going to top "Outlaw King" at $ 200 million, but that's drawing attention thanks to Martin Scorsese, De Niro & Pacino, and Netflix is probably hoping for Oscar buzz.

 

To be fair the first one is a lot of fun, the second one was so bad I never bothered with the third.

 

I liked the anime trilogy as a heady philosophical scifi story, but they totally missed the opportunity of what a Godzilla anime could have been. You'd think, looking at animes like "Akira" or "Gundam", big kaiju battles animated in that style would be the dopest thing ever, and instead you had a Godzilla that barely moved, and he was the one that they stayed relatively close to the original concept with. Mechagodzilla City could have been awesome, instead it was barely doing anything. Mothra was more a hint than an actual appearance. And Ghidorah were the ghost dragon heads on really, really long necks sticking out of black holes.

 

It's kind of crazy that America produces the better Godzilla vs King Ghidorah fight scene than Japan. I think there were a lot of interesting ideas in the trilogy, they just didn't do anything with them. And for all the complaints people had about the human characters in the Monsterverse, they're still better and more interesting than the animated ones.

 

I'm not as worried about the box office as others. It may be underperforming in the US, but it's doing very well elsewhere - eg, China and Japan - and will likely still make a modest profit as a result. As to why it's not doing so well in the US, you can actually draw parallels with Star Trek Beyond, in that it also had to contend with publicity issues and an over-saturated marketplace.

In KOTM's case the marketing was probably a little overdone, which can be off-putting, and you could argue it didn't do quite enough to distinguish itself from all the other city/planet/universe-smashing movies out there. That X-Men: Dark Phoenix and The Secret Life of Pets 2 are also underperforming, X-Men a little more so than KOTM, is strongly suggestive of fatigue in movie-goers. The way things are going it wouldn't surprise me if Hobbs & Shaw stumbled, too, and even the Marvel bubble has to burst some time.

At the very least, don't write the Monsterverse off quite yet.