MONSTERS’ BRAWL

When Total Film catches up with Godzilla Vs. Kong director Adam Wingard in February 2021, his long-awaited crossover grudge-match movie is “100 per cent done”. All he has left to do is sign off IMAX and Dolby Vision 3D versions.

This film has been a long time coming, and not just because it’s the culmination of a MonsterVerse arc that began with 2014’s Godzilla reboot, and continued through 2017’s Kong: Skull Island and 2019’s Godzilla sequel, King Of The Monsters. After a couple of release-date postponements, Godzilla Vs. Kong is almost upon us, with a US release in March, where it’ll land on cinema screens as well as streaming for HBO Max subscribers.

For Wingard, this post-production phase hasn’t been too badly disrupted by the pandemic that’s obliterated cinema schedules. “We had our first test screening at the end of February [2020] that went really great,” he recalls. “So it was good that we got a test screening in before the pandemic hit, because it really gave us the confidence of: ‘OK, everything’s landing.’ Even though the test screening didn’t have all the finished VFX and stuff, the fact it went really well and was positive, it really gave us a lot of energy to push through to the end.”

With the film due to land after 12 months of Covid-19 misery, Wingard is confident that GvK will hit differently in this brave new world. “I knew we made a film that was for the audiences – for adults and for kids – and that it’s a total crowd-pleaser from start to finish,” he beams. “It’s basically non-stop action at a certain point. But I didn’t realise that there’s a kind of new element that’s been floating around.”

After a tumultuous year, politically and otherwise, Wingard sees the concept as having “struck a subconscious chord