#How Godzilla Vs. Kong Battled The Pandemic (And Won)

The MonsterVerse as we know it was born in 2015 when Legendary Pictures moved “Kong: Skull Island” from Universal Pictures to Warner Bros., the studio that had just re-launched a successful version of “Godzilla” in 2014. It was soon confirmed that the plan was to bring the two legendary monsters together in “Godzilla vs. Kong.” Jordan Vogt-Roberts directed “Skull Island,” introducing us to this new version of King Kong, while Michael Dougherty was working on “King of the Monsters.” 

Legendary made the unique decision to have a new director at the helm for each entry in this franchise to date. To that end, Adam Wingard – coming off of 2016’s “Black Witch,” as well as genre hits “You’re Next” and “The Guest” — was tapped to direct “Godzilla vs. Kong” in 2017. Wingard threw himself head-first into the project, watching every single film in both monsters’ respective canon to prepare. But one of the biggest things that Wingard did was to declare, relatively early on, that there would be a definitive winner. This would ultimately become prevalent in the marketing with the tagline “one will fall.” Speaking to EW back in 2017, the filmmaker had this to say:

“The original film was very fun, but you feel a little let down that the movie doesn’t take a definitive stance. People are still debating now who won in that original movie, you know. So, I do want people to walk away from this film feeling like, ‘Okay, there is a winner.'”

Warner Bros. and Legendary also took the somewhat unconventional approach to have a full writers’ room working on the movie, with Terry Rossio, Dougherty, and Zach Shields credited, in the end, with cooking up the story, while Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein were credited for the screenplay. That is a whole bunch of cooks in the kitchen.

Filming kicked off in November 2018 with a gigantic cast full of talent, including Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Alexander Skarsgård, Brian Tyree Henry, Eiza González, Zhang Ziyi, and Demián Bichir, among others. While the human cast would ultimately take a backseat to the two most popular monsters in cinematic history going toe-to-toe, loading up with star power can’t hurt. And it didn’t hurt, as it turns out, even if the film was delayed several times by the pandemic that, when production first began, nobody saw coming.