Is the Monsterverse doomed to begin with?

[kaijuguy19]

I know this is a big depressing subject to talk about but with how KOTM turned out in the box office and the many reasons people pointed out on why it didn't do so hot such as the 5 year gap, I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps the very idea of the Monsterverse was doomed right from the start and that perhaps it's best if it was never attempted to begin with.

I know some will say that Godzilla vs Kong will do a lot to help turn things around for the Monsterverse next year but the thing is we all thought the same thing for KOTM and look what happened. I want GvK to do amazing but we also need to remember the facts that even if GvK does well both critically and money wise, monster movies in general haven't always gotten the kindest treatment from critics especially the Japanese kind and the ones that do are seldom if at all so there's a chance that critics will destroy any chance of the Monsterverse from continuing on.

So what do you guys think? Do you think it would've been better if Legendary just stuck to doing a Godzilla trilogy and that's it or do you think there's still hope for the Monsterverse to go on after GvK?

[_JNavs_]

No not at all, there's plenty of hope for this universe.

I do however, feel like this thread isn't going to end well, like mixing gasoline and matches.

[JAGzilla]

KOTM, while it absolutely had its high points and I personally liked it, was a mess. Let's be real. The pacing was too fast, the human characters okay at best, the humor painfully immature, the exposition clumsy as hell, and the sci-fi science outright bonkers to an insulting extent. It didn't fail because it was a monster movie, it failed because it was poorly made. The five year gap was probably also a factor, and it was surrounded by Marvel and Disney movies, meaning it was always going to have to struggle. The Monsterverse is fully capable of surviving, it just needs some better writers and directors. And I'm going to reiterate the better writers part. Make a good movie, market it well, and it could be decently successful. It's never going to be some Oscar-winning critical darling in the West simply because this is an inherently silly niche genre and always has been, but it can absolutely stay afloat.

[UltramanGoji]

The MonsterVerse, as a concept, is a failure. There is no greater cinematic universe at play, just a prequel and two sequels to the initial movie. Next year we have the big crossover film after, what, maybe one and a half films of buildup? After that, what’s there to go? Whats there to incorporate? How can you expand this universe beyond Godzilla and Kong? Some will say Gamera or Ultraman but that’s just a fever dream at this point. I just don’t think there was ever a way to fully make a Marvel-styled cinematic universe with this property. Godzilla is really the only character with a wide range of options for such a concept but it’s an extremely niche and ridiculed franchise in America. Something like this just wasn’t ever going to be as successful as we’d hoped. A crossover with Kong is the ceiling.

The movie’s themselves on the other hand? Hard to say. We’re not done yet, that’s for sure. We’ve had two successes and one disappointment (read: not a failure, just an underperforming film). GVK will make or break it, I think.

[_JNavs_]

A Godzilla 3 post Godzilla vs Kong would likely be just as, if not more successful than the first 2 successes in the Monsterverse.

People will know that these 2 now co-exist in the same world. Kong 2 could do numbers and G3 could do numbers.

There is no ceiling when imagination's the limit. All the extra "add Ultraman, add Gappa, add Daimaijin" hoopla nonsense isn't about expanding the universe MCU style with solo films, it's about giving Godzilla his own new franchise he so rightfully deserves after a 23 year gap since his last long term universe. Along with giving Kong his FIRST ever franchise where he survives the first film and becomes a dominant force of nature.

[BlankAccount]

KOTM, while it absolutely had its high points and I personally liked it, was a mess. Let's be real. The pacing was too fast, the human characters okay at best, the humor painfully immature, the exposition clumsy as hell, and the sci-fi science outright bonkers to an insulting extent. It didn't fail because it was a monster movie, it failed because it was poorly made. The five year gap was probably also a factor, and it was surrounded by Marvel and Disney movies, meaning it was always going to have to struggle. The Monsterverse is fully capable of surviving, it just needs some better writers and directors. And I'm going to reiterate the better writers part. Make a good movie, market it well, and it could be decently successful. It's never going to be some Oscar-winning critical darling in the West simply because this is an inherently silly niche genre and always has been, but it can absolutely stay afloat.

Marketing and trailers spoiling KOTM doesn't help either. Some of you guys may think it's silly, but there are people who lose interest when spoiled cause they feel like they can fill in the gap, a member on here even confirmed their friend lost interest when Burning Godzilla spoiled to them as they figured "oh so he uses that power up to kill the other dragon". Can't say he was wrong, that's exactly what happened.

Also as much as I hate treating the audience like idiots, you're gonna have to hammer it on their heads this is a shared cinematic universe. People have short attention spans nowdays so sadly you can't be subtle, someone on here said they told their boss about Godzilla vs Kong and he asked if it was a crossover with the 2005 Kong or the K:SI one. On one hand I wanna be like there's all these references to MONARCH in all these films, but on the other hand they were pretty easily forgotten halfway through G2014 and K:SI. Like I remember Grham, Randa, Brooks and Serizawa but forget they are working for MONARCH. I think KOTM is the only time they (MONARCH) actually left a long lasting impression on me where I remembered them by the end.

[LSD Jellyfish]

The Monterverse is dumb because of the name alone. If it was just a series of movies, that shared slight continuity, then no one would bat an eye. Basically, the curse of a cinematic universe, is when you label it such. 2/3 films of the series, were financially, and critically successful, with a fourth entry on the way. KOTM wasn't well received, but it broke even. In comparison to something like MCU, it's a failure, but by its own its a great success.

[Mr_Goji_and_Watch]

No lol. Two middling successes could have lead to a breakout hit, its just that KOTM failed to deliver and all hope rests on GVK.

One movie flops and all of a sudden its a "critics/audiences have an inherent dislike for the genre" despite past positive reception.

[GuardianGhido]

Well the first two movies pretty much matched the early MCU, KOTM was a misstep (competing with Aladdin and Endgame was a bad idea and the poop marketing destroyed any chances it had against them), so if GvK can right the ship, I say it's smooth sailing from there. If it can't though, it still might not be over yet if Legendary and WB still see potential. Too early to say. I will however say that it was most definitely not "doomed from the start". The first two movies showed a very promising start, and KOTM only faltered against ludicrously heavy competition with it's terrible marketing to blame as well. I'm not denying there were other factor to it's BO disappointment, but those to me seem like the biggest. If GvK can stand up to Mulan, (and we'll get a free week before it too) the Monsterverse might survive yet.

Added in 4 minutes 40 seconds:

Also as much as I hate treating the audience like idiots, you're gonna have to hammer it on their heads this is a shared cinematic universe. People have short attention spans nowdays so sadly you can't be subtle, someone on here said they told their boss about Godzilla vs Kong and he asked if it was a crossover with the 2005 Kong or the K:SI one. On one hand I wanna be like there's all these references to MONARCH in all these films, but on the other hand they were pretty easily forgotten halfway through G2014 and K:SI. Like I remember Grham, Randa, Brooks and Serizawa but forget they are working for MONARCH. I think KOTM is the only time they (MONARCH) actually left a long lasting impression on me where I remembered them by the end.

Also, I agree 100% on this little point here. If you're gonna make a whole shared universe about these big fellows, you're gonna have to beat it into the people's heads. The novelty of a cinematic universe alone should be able to draw in a decent crowd, yet almost nobody watching KOTM in my area even knew it was part of any cinematic universe at all, some didn't even know it was a sequel to G14! Being so subtle about shared universes with Kong's 3 second cameo or a small prologue to the battle in G14 isn't enough, you'll have to take a blunter approach than that. Make a cool Monsterverse logo at the beginning, showing the monsters established so far roaring and doing intimdation displays before coverin it with a classified monarch logo with the name MONSTERVERSE on it! Make more explicit ties to other movies by having an overarching cast that appears in different movies. I really loved how Houston Brooks appeared in KOTM, but he was only given a tiny 1 minute role of watching Mothra hatch, We need human stars that appear throughout the verse as well as the monsters themselves in order to help the people connect better.

If you go through the trouble of making a whole cinematic universe LET US KNOW THIS IS A CINEMATIC UNIVERSE! It almost feels like they saw the Dark Universe crash and burn by trying to set up everything for the universe instead of focusing on the movie itself and just went in the opposite direction, making standalone movies with only throwaway lines or minor cameos to make flimsy connections with each other.

[GodzillaFan1990's]

If Legendary isn't smart with the marketing for Godzilla vs. Kong this time then yes.

They'll screw up if they don't release the teaser at NYCC (Along with playing during previews with Joker) and final trailer with Birds of Prey.

Bad marketing was among the reasons KotM failed to begin with. They were so confident in themselves thinking nothing would go wrong they thought it wouldn't matter if they released the trailer almost a year from release.

Given they're playing smart this time though and taking precautions they'll be better with the marketing closer to the release date that's only if they don't do another delay which will seal the movies and franchises fate.

[king_ghidorah]

I don’t see where they could go from GvK. I’ve always thought it would be the logical conclusion of this shared universe.

I also think the GA didn’t want a heroic Godzilla. Had they made him scary I think the audience reception would have been better and you could have built to a better concluding film with a villainous or anti hero G and a heroic Kong.

Then factor in GKOTM being a mess of a film and G 14 giving people blue balls yeah, it’s kind of a dead franchise at this point

[LSD Jellyfish]

I don’t see where they could go from GvK. I’ve always thought it would be the logical conclusion of this shared universe.

I also think the GA didn’t want a heroic Godzilla. Had they made him scary I think the audience reception would have been better and you could have built to a better concluding film with a villainous or anti hero G and a heroic Kong.

Then factor in GKOTM being a mess of a film and G 14 giving people blue balls yeah, it’s kind of a dead franchise at this point

It feels like G14 was made with no sequels in mind, it was mildly successful, and then they got the right to Kong and realized they could make them share a universe in order to have Kong Vs Godzilla. Even before KSI, KVG was always the end game.

[BioDestroyer]

Here's the issue with running on the cinematic universe gravy train. Marvel had a vision and worked on each individual film and characters over a very long period of time. But more than that, it was the characters that brought everything together. The long term stuff was just the icing and NOT the cake. Iron Man as a character was interesting, changed, grew, and went through several different arcs as a character throughout his movies as well as the crossover ones. Same goes for most of the other superheroes. I mean, Iron Man wasn't even that well known to the layman before the movies and Robert Downey Jr. came up to bat (and mostly knocked it out of the park in several important ways). Yes, there were certainly some missteps (Iron Man 2, Thor 1-2, etc) but there was a singular creative vision that wasn't afraid to mix things up, try new things, and think of the long game of the characters. No one outside of people who read the comics cared about Thanos. Most didn't even know who he was when he popped up in little teasers but that was never the point. His easter eggs were there for the people who knew him, it raised a bit of intrigue for the people who didn't, and when the time finally came he was a fully realized character that clearly went through many different iterations but was perfectly realized in Infinity War. The people at Marvel wrote characters that were memorable and actual characters.

At the end of the day, people don't really care that any given film is in a cinematic universe. What they actually care about is the very film they're watching and whether it's good or not. Whether it has interesting characters or not. Whether it has dilemmas that you want to see a solution to---whether it's a character you've grown to love finding themselves stuck in a completely new situation and finding that things they once believed to be true is actually a lie or characters needing to find a new pathway forward or whatever. That is---when people are excited about another Marvel movie coming out, it's not purely because they just want another Marvel movie. It's because they want to see what Iron Man does ne---oh, OK maybe not him anymore but they want to see Steve Rogers step up to----ah, right. Never mind not him either. It's because they want to see Spidey swing into action and find out how he grows in the face of adversi---OK YOU GET THE POINT. That said, I'm not saying that Marvel being a cinematic universe isn't a draw. It most certainly is. But what's constantly missed from film studios trying to emulate Marvel's success is why it's a draw. Why do people want to see these movies? Is it only because such-and-such movie is set in the same world as so-and-so? I think we can clearly see it's a resounding no.

DC had the most popular superheroes in the world, thousands of stories to pull from, decades of history and opted to rush for Marvel money thinking people were watching those films simply because they were in a cinematic universe. Turns out they saw the green but didn't look any deeper than that. That's how we get Superman fighting Batman in a long, boring CGI mess with "Martha" being about the only meaningful thing you can think of coming out of either Superman's or Batman's mouths.

The Monsterverse pushes the universe way too hard instead of focusing on the important bits---the characters and the stories. Now you don't have to have strong singular characters in your film but you have to know what you're doing in lieu of that. And if you're wanting to make a cinematic universe that people are buzzed to see then you have to do more than just say that and then throw monsters from different movies together. At the end of the day, there were no interesting characters in either Godzilla films and for some weird reason, the best actors they got their hands on---John Goodman and Samuel Jackson (and Hiddleston too, I guess)---were somewhat wasted in the Kong film (though maybe their schedules were just too busy to keep them for the main storyline). Add that there also weren't interesting stories told or realized and it's just, well, just OK.

So what do we have in the Monsterverse films? No one of note. The only reoccurring characters were Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins who are actually a really good actor and actress who have very little character in two films, even less to do, and both die with zero or at best, questionable emotional weight. Instead we get two bog-standard "save my family" cliche tales that get in the way more than anything. We get monsters but even they can get short-changed in their own movie (Mothra Imago anyone?).

There's no real vision to the overall project, there aren't any interesting characters, the world makes questionable sense, the overall theme is confused, and the monsters are still obscured in a few important ways. So what's left to grab onto in terms of real staying power and making this a powerhouse movie franchise? Of course, an immediate counterpoint is the Transformers films which is on movie 8 or whatever and is a billion dollar franchise but that is working on very different parameters that these Godzilla films aren't operating on, though digging into that weird situation might be worth it for another thread in another place.

Anyway, those are my two cents.

[Orichalcum]

JAGzilla and UltramanGoji summed everything up perfectly, GKOTM was a financial failure because it was a sloppy ass movie with piss poor writing, acting, and directing, that movie was doomed from the start when Mike got his hands on the project.

That being said, even if it were a success there's no where for the MV to go, GvK is the end all be all of this universe and after that, that's it.

We'll just have to settle with two decent movies, a garbage one, and whatever GvK turns out to be- we can only hope GKOTM taught a valuable lesson and they learn to put some effort into this next entry instead of treating it like a sloppy MCU wannabe that nobody wants to see.

[Manuelito Canelito]

In terms of quantity of movies? Yeah. Marvel or DC have a nigh infinite library of characters and things from which to make movies with.

Godzilla doesn't nearly have as much, so there was always going to be a limited amount of movies (and Kong has...Kong)

Now, in terms of quality? Not at all.

Just happens that KOTM, while I did have a good time watching on the cinema, has it's number of flaws that drag it down.

[JesstrK]

I also think the GA didn’t want a heroic Godzilla. Had they made him scary I think the audience reception would have been better and you could have built to a better concluding film with a villainous or anti hero G and a heroic Kong.

Eh, I really don't think heroic Godzilla is what ruined it for people. Everyone I've talked to responded positively to that aspect of it for both G14 and KOTM. People in my theater actually clapped during Godzilla's more heroic moments for both films. And, anyone I talk to in casual conversation and Godzilla vs. Kong comes up, I ask them who they want to win (mind you, who they want to win, not who they think is more likely to win) and they say Godzilla.

[kaijuguy19]

The MonsterVerse, as a concept, is a failure. There is no greater cinematic universe at play, just a prequel and two sequels to the initial movie. Next year we have the big crossover film after, what, maybe one and a half films of buildup? After that, what’s there to go? Whats there to incorporate? How can you expand this universe beyond Godzilla and Kong? Some will say Gamera or Ultraman but that’s just a fever dream at this point. I just don’t think there was ever a way to fully make a Marvel-styled cinematic universe with this property. Godzilla is really the only character with a wide range of options for such a concept but it’s an extremely niche and ridiculed franchise in America. Something like this just wasn’t ever going to be as successful as we’d hoped. A crossover with Kong is the ceiling.

The movie’s themselves on the other hand? Hard to say. We’re not done yet, that’s for sure. We’ve had two successes and one disappointment (read: not a failure, just an underperforming film). GVK will make or break it, I think.

You can bring in monsters from Warner Brother's own library such as Rehdosaurus,Ymir,Them etc into the Monsterverse along with building upon some of the new creations it brought such as Behemoth, Not to mention that it'd be a good time to bring in some ideas and creations that were planned but never saw the light of day like Gryphon from the 94 Godzilla movie as well as Frankenstein vs Kong. Add that to Toho renewing their contract with Legendary and allowing them to use more Toho creations and the Monsterverse will have plenty to offer after GvK.

So yeah there's actually still plenty of things to do after GvK but again that depends on GvK being a hit to begin with.

[Orichalcum]

None of that would put butts in seats lol

[GodzillaFan1990's]

Its official. Orichalcum is the new Ryguy and before him was BARAGONBREH.

The pessimistic trio.

[Maritonic]

Orichalcum aka the new Ryguy/BARAGONBREH.

The trilogy is complete.

Let's not.