Godzilla vs Kong
In the wake of the monstrous success of Legendary’s newest Monsterverse outing, Godzilla Vs. Kong, reports indicate that another Monsterverse film may indeed be on the horizon. Godzilla vs. Kong has become the top-grossing film of the pandemic-era, crossing $400 million globally (despite still awaiting a premiere in several larger markets, like Britain, Japan, and the U.K.). Thus far, it is the second highest grossing film of the Monsterverse series (Kong: Skull Island’s $556 million stands as the first thus far).
The fate of the Monsterverse became uncertain upon the relative underperformance of the prior cinematic entry. The prior entry, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, bowed out to $386 million (itself costing roughly $170 million), but GvK showed that there’s significant life left in the frachise by box office standards. The report indicated that one possible follow-up to the series could be Son of Kong.
There is certainly precedent for Kong to have cinematic progeny. When RKO Pictures quickly greenlit a sequel to King Kong, they came up with Son of Kong almost immediately (debuting nine months after its progenitor). It takes place one month after Kong’s fateful New York adventure, where filmmaker Carl Denham (who set in motion the events of the original film) returns to Skull Island to encounter ‘Little Kong’, an albino ape that’s quite large (but much smaller than Kong himself). The concept of Kong having a son continues in the 1986 film King Kong Lives.
At the same time, there are a number of possible characters in the kaiju canon that could well be viable parts of a future sequel, and perhaps more exciting elements for the future of the franchise. Here are a few untapped kaiju that belong in the next Monsterverse outing.
Hedorah (aka the Smog Monster)
Godzilla: King of the Monsters substantially reinforced environmental themes within the Monsterverse iteration of Godzilla’s story: Godzilla is presented as a sort of guardian of nature, bringing the natural order back in balance, while Titans themselves are said to provoke new ecological growth and restore the environment by their very natures. As novel as this sort of explicit ecological messaging is for a mainstream modern franchise, it surely isn’t the first time explicitly environmental themes have been present in a Godzilla film. In fact, one of Godzilla’s most unique villains, Hedorah (seen in Godzilla vs Hedorah) is an extraterrestrial blob that feeds off pollution (the film itself is a damning critique of the pollution in Japanese waters in its era), doing considerable damage to the King of the Monsters because of its inherent toxicity. With a little retconning he’d fit right in, providing a novel challenge in a future Monsterverse film.
Biollante
Biollante’s origins in the original Godzilla vs. Biollante are somewhat murky—posited as the creation of a grieving scientist who spliced together the DNA of his deceased daughter, a rose (her favorite flower), and Godzilla’s DNA (in hopes that his regeneration factor could make the rose hybrids more resilient), the three-part-hybrid eventually evolved into a massive beast with multiple evolving forms. It’s surely a strange origin story but the resulting plant-human-Godzilla hybrid was one of Godzilla’s greatest and most interesting challenges, and one of the most visually unique, awe-inspiring kaiju in the Toho films. It would certainly provide a new type of kaiju in a subsequent film.
Destoroyah
In the original 1954 film, Godzilla faces death at the hands of the ‘Oxygen Destroyer’ weapon, one of the few times that Godzilla has actually truly died in a film. The weapon has made a number of subsequent appearances, but for our purposes the most notable (and recent) is in Godzilla: King of the Monsters itself—the military drops the weapon on Godzilla and Ghidorah, failing to impact the latter but nearly killing Godzilla in the process.
Godzilla vs. Destoroyah builds off the weapon’s mythos by positing that the device’s detonation in the original film resulted in the mutation of a group of crustaceans into the powerful, destructive kaiju Destoroyah, a winged, horned beast that threatens the planet. In the film, Godzilla is reaching a point of nuclear instability that threatens his own life and the planet at large—he’s approaching a temperature level where he could conceivably melt down through the Earth’s mantle and into the core, ending all Earthly life. Godzilla defeats Destoroyah and dies, his energy passing into Godzilla’s son (no Godzilla progeny has been introduced into the Monsterverse), mutating him into a new, adult Godzilla. To fit Destoroyah into the Monsterverse may require some conceptual retooling, but it could provide a strong and already established means of ‘retiring’ an aging, battle-damaged Godzilla and bringing a ‘new generation’ forward.
