Adam Wingard is buzzing. The director is Zooming from São Paulo, Brazil, where he’s attending Comic Con – or CCXP, if you prefer. It’s just hours since the first trailer for Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has dropped, and after months and months of blanket secrecy, there have been revelations of some super-cool shit, to use the technical term. Mini Kong! Badass red-ape titan Skar King! All-new images of Hollow Earth! Godzilla boasting a makeover colour scheme! Kong sporting a freaking bionic arm! And in the trailer’s climactic shot, Kong and Godzilla running side by side into battle like some supersized Batman and Robin cloaked in hair and scales.
‘Yeah!’ grins Wingard, who challenges Kong in the hair stakes with his explosively unruly barnet and bushy, grey-streaked beard cascading down his chest. ‘For me, the starting point for this movie was that shot of them running into battle together. That was the very first image that I really had of this movie. That’s where you want to end up. It was like, “If we can make something that justifies this moment, then we know we’ve done it right.”’
Judging from the first trailer, and from ’s chats with Wingard and his cast and crew, is sure as hell going to justify its superheroic-monsters shot. The story begins just a little down the line from where 2021’s concluded. Should you need reminding, that titanic smackdown of a movie, also directed by Wingard, ended with everyone’s two favourite kaiju coming to an uneasy truce. Sure, they’d spent most of the story beating one another to a pulp, but then they’d joined forces to take down Apex’s monstrous tech creation, Mechagodzilla. With the hard-earned victory came a grudging respect and an understanding: Kong would toddle off to rule the subterranean Hollow Earth, while Godzilla would glide back into the ocean knowing that the surface world was his dominion. ‘Godzilla kind of tells him, “All right, I’ll let you go this time. But I don’t want to see you around these parts again, and if I do, there’s going to be trouble,”’ says Wingard with a
