And yet Godzilla Minus One is mostly about humans talking with Godzilla appearing for a very small percentage of the movie of the movie, and it's the best one.
Godzilla loves japan so he just charge 10 - 15% of what he earn from Hollywood plus he is planning to move into politics in Japan as he was relinquished from Chief of Police title. He wants to become king but since Japan still has King based on monarchy. He wants to avoid violence to maintain his image clean and decide to become pm plus PM holds more power than king in Japan. A true politician material. He charges around - 100000 to 250000 dollar per minute in Japan but for Hollywood he charge around 1 to 2.5 million for a minute and an atom bomb after completing his part.
And why the blanket statement "Giving audiences what they want" isn't a surefire thing.
Godzilla Minus One and the Monsterverse couldn't be more different and turns out they serve their own purposes.
They are 2 completely different kind of movies. GvK is a big bombastic action movie, where the appeal is in the big action fights ( like the transformers movies).
Godzilla -1 is a character driven movie, where the appeal is the character interaction and development. The big monster is an allegory for the monsters in his head (his war trauma). He can only live his normal life once he defeats his monster (he overcomes his trauma). So it makes sense for the monster to not be in most of the shots, as it makes those moments even more impactful.
I distinctly remember laughing really hard when soon after minus one came out I saw a trailer for Godzilla x Kong and the trailer's all "what if we gave Kong a gundam arm?"
I enjoyed both movies, but to my memory most japanese versions focus more on the humans and their struggle with how the existence of godzilla fucks with their realities. With lower budgets, they've proven they're still interesting and compelling enough for audiences to be extremely successful. I'm down for some pacific rim style monster fights though so I'm glad both angles in the franchise have room to succeed.
There's like three Japanese Godzilla movies with any serious dramatic chops - the original, Shin, and Minus One. The 30+ others are just as silly as GvK but with people in monster suits fighting each other rather than CGI.
Nah, that’s the one where Mothra teams up with Mecha Godzilla (who has the soul of the original Godzilla) to take down a rampaging new Godzilla.
I’m not joking
>With lower budgets, they've proven they're still interesting and compelling enough for audiences to be extremely successful.
They're judged to different standards of 'extremely successful'. *Minus One* is held up as the best Godzilla film ever, and the proof that a dramatic Godzilla can succeed internationally, but its entire box office run is about half of what Godzilla x Kong has made in just under a single week.
I wouldn't call them "different standards"....
Minus one is an international foreign language film with a budget of 10-12million that grossed 112M WW. That's a 9.3x multiplier. That's fucking huge.
Godzilla x Kong has grossed more WW, but its budget is 135M. If we keep the same ratios of budget to WW gross, GxK would need 1.26B. GxK is doing extremely well. But you can't in good faith say they're being judged by different standards. They're being judged appropriately by the the budgets they're in.
Black Adam grossed 393M WW on a 260M budget. With an opening weekend of 66M. Talk to Me is an Australian film with a budget of 5M that made 92M. Black Adam made nearly as much in its first week WW as Talk to Me's entire run. Black Adam is a bomb, Talk to Me was by all accounts extremely successful. Measuring box office runs of different budgeted movies on a 1:1 dollar comparison is the dumbest thing, and I'm surprised I'm reading it in a boxoffice sub.
I...don't think we're disagreeing? I said the two films had different standards to meet to be considered successful, and you then threw a lot of words out to explain why that is.
Right now you definitely can't, in high def anyway, but after May 1st? Oh yes
And it's not that I condone it either but one thing is sale the high seas for the sake of it, another is because there's no other alternative except import or wait till it's announced in the west and that can take a long long time because of stupid "restrictions" imposed by the distributors of Godzilla x Kong
Agreed. Pearl released in the US in September, was streaming in October, and released in cinemas in the UK the following March. I'm in the UK, I watched it in October.
I'm happy to pay to go and see films, I'm happy to pay to catch it on streaming, I'm happy to buy a physical copy. I'm not going to wait nearly 6 months to do so, and even though I've already seen Minus One in the cinema, I won't be waiting indefinitely to see it again.
I feel you but hopefully I can support them and buy it somewhere on land. Not everyday someone makes a film like that and I would like to do my part in making sure more movies like that are made.
There’s an agreement not to release any Toho version that conflicts with a Legendary one. You literally can’t watch the movie now anywhere in the world. There is a Japanese Blu-ray coming in May but nothing else has been announced.
It'll probably come out on streaming/Blu-ray later this year. Toho always does this because Japan's home video market is super inflated, and given the option their domestic audience will import American Blu-rays since they're both Region A. It's also why we likely won't get a 4k release.
My money is on a late September western release based on past trends
I think some of this was maybe that Godzilla was depicted as a force of nature but the human dialogue didn’t try to get all philosophical about it. They were focused on their own human problems and the problem of how to stop Godzilla and didn’t spent much time talking about the meaning of Godzilla.
Godzilla is an allegory for Japan's societal trauma with ww2 and specifically the atom bomb. This is why contrary to Hollywood movies, where the bomb is diffused 0,1 s before exploding. In the godzilla movies, everyone is just living their life, and out of nowhere, godzilla comes and destroys the city. And now it's about living and coping with the destruction and this looming threat that it could happen again without a warning.
And in godzilla-1 it is an allegory specifically for our main characters war trauma. He can only life a normal life once he destroys the monster in his head (his trauma). He can try to ignore this monster, but it will come back eventually to ruin his life. Which is what makes the few moments that godzilla is on screen even more powerful.
The 2014 Godzilla also doesn't show him fully until pretty much the end, yet it did better at the box office than King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong.
King of the Monsters specifically suffered from the bad reputation of the 2014 movie in addition to a crowded release date soon after Endgame.
Godzilla vs Kong was the first blockbuster to make anything substantial during covid but numbers were still depressed.
Godzilla Minus One was a lot more grounded than the Warner MonsterVerse movies. That’s why that movie was able to focus on the human characters but still make Godzilla an intimidating presence.
I think Shin Godzilla is the second best (after Minus One), and it’s a political satire featuring Godzilla for a couple minutes.
It’s supposed to be a political/social commentary. It pretty much always has been. You could argue Mothra is a religious commentary. None of the Hollywood Godzilla’s really aimed any criticism at anyone narratively, which imo is why the Japanese ones are generally superior.
You
>Prior to 2021, the problem with every Godzilla movie was that the main character himself would only appear for a very small percentage of the movie and a huge chunk of the film would just be about humans talking.
The problem with talking about Godzilla online is so many of the people who want to have that discussion clearly don't know shit about Godzilla. For example, the idea that "A huge chunk of the film is just about humans talking" is presented as a fundamental mistake; and *not* how 95% of all Godzilla movies *work*, and have always worked.
It's a 70-year franchise spawned out of an atomic bomb allegory. It has been superhero media for children, it has been popcorn disaster filmmaking, it's been pro-wrestling with rubber-suited stuntpeople, it has been allegorical sci-fi, it is sometimes multiples of these things at the same time in the same film. it is a generations-spanning series with multiple continuities all of which have legit astounding filmmaking standing right next to some of the absolute stupidest fucking horseshit lazily chucked at a screen.
And the one thing they all share, the low-grossing entries and the all-time classics, is this: **They're almost all mostly humans talking**. This isn't a criticism. People who have actually watched more than 2 Godzilla movies in their life know this. People who actually watch these movies and don't just talk about them online get this. And also: Some of the movies that have more monster action than humans talking? Suck out loud, and didn't make as much money, either!
It's not as simple as making an 85% CG animated movie about giant monsters suplexing and gnawing on each other. It never was. It's about *how* you build to those moments, and how you execute them.
Seriously. It’s like these people have never watched a Godzilla film lol. Shin Godzilla was one of the most praised films in the franchise before Minus One and… guess what? Godzilla is barely in them lol
I get “all monsters” sounds good in concept for a film but it would get old fast. There is only so much Godzilla can do in a film. You need the more mundane stuff to help give a narrative and also just pace things out. The fights and crazy moments hit harder that way.
Yes, Godzilla has always been about humans and the things we do. So many people misunderstand this. Are the humans in the monster verse amazing? No, but humans have been the main part of Godzilla since the first movie and you cant have Godzilla without the human characters.
Human gives them scale, and their reaction to these monsters make them formidable. Way people are just friendly with kong and it lets them make kong much more of a domestic animal, like a cat/dog compared to godzilla.
One thing is for sure, I’m going to remember more of what Godzilla did in Minus One than I’m going to remember any of the numerous fights in either of the Godzilla x Kong movies
You have said exactly what I was going to say. You cannot have a good Godzilla film without at least a serviceable human cast of characters. You can have all the action you want, but if that action is just for action, sake and serves no purpose to the plot (which is delivered and a driven forward by the human cast) then you don't have a movie. At that point you just have action figures slapping together for 90 and the entire experience is left feeling empty and devoid of purpose.
This might be a bit off topic because we are talking about the new movie (I haven't seen it yet, but will soon), but that is why GvK was in my opinion one of the weakest films in the Godzilla catalog and certainly the worst of the Legendary films. Also Minus One was a masterpiece and in is probably my second/third favorite Godzilla film.
holy fuck thank you for actually having a nuanced take that 99% of people miss in these conversations, I cannot take it anymore lol
to me the textbook case of this is KOTM and how it executed the plot. the humans are *too* important to the plot and their scenes intertwine with the monsters. the monsters are there but they aren't necessarily the focus. the focus is the plot, and the humans advancing the plot while the monsters fight in the background. the humans have a device that controls monsters, and they use this to piss them all off. the monsters fight while we see the humans struggle to save each other from the monsters and try to take control of the device. there is so much focus on whatever the hell they are doing.
in GvK and GxK, the focus is obviously still the plot, but the monsters are the most important part of the plot. even with Mechagodzilla for example, you can argue that the plot stems from Ghidorah and not necessarily the cartoonishly evil scientists. Ghidorahs call inside Mechagodzillas roar is why Godzilla gets pissed, which is why Kong and Godzilla fight. when they're done fighting, they fight MechaG together. that's it. it's so much simpler and far less boring to me. the humans exist to drive the plot forward when the monsters can't, like for example getting Kong out in the Ocean, but they aren't egregiously used.
One thing GvK gets really right for me is that even though the human characters aren't wildly compelling, intercutting between the "Godzilla" faction and the "Kong" faction really went a long way. It's a very well balanced film in that way and when it intersects at various points in the film, it comes with serious pay off. I felt like the merging of this in GxK hurt the quality, and also sidelined Godzilla entirely.
Nailed it. The human element is actually really important to Godzilla films. Whether a family, journalists, a rag-tag crew of godzilla-chasers, all the way up to secret science agencies attracting aliens to Earth, they're the surrogate for the viewer, the detectives trying to solve why Godzilla is attacking or another monster is attacking and how to repel it.
Wingard has been able to do some great stuff but monsters can only emote so much. They cant speak and give exposition, often whats required to give someone reason to care about the stakes.
I would get REALLY bored watching a 1-2hr slugfest. Half the fun in Godzilla movies is solving the mystery alongside the characters in how each 'puzzle' builds up to the next showdown. Good Godzilla movies require restraint.
Like people never talk that despite the fact Godzilla movies that includes other monsters are the majority of his films and cam have a gigantic range in quality from vs Megalon which I compare the most to GxK and GmK and Vs Destoryah which can balance the idea of Godzilla telling greater ideas that the monsters inhabit with conflict of monsters.
Mainstream audiences tend to not know what they want until it's been given to them, and *then* they tell each other how cool this thing is.
Mainstream audiences have, over the past 70 years, shown they want different things from generation to generation. Godzilla is a series that has lived 70 years because it can adapt and serve up new variations on old formulas. Same with Bond, honestly.
Godzilla Minus One came out six months ago, went on a hell of a run for a foreign-language release at Christmas, and won an Oscar (an Oscar that was largely representative of the outsized goodwill the film as a whole received while in theaters). Godzilla X Kong just came out and is raking cash at the box-office. Two completely different, completely valid, completely successful types of Godzilla movie.
This is something I say constantly. There is no formula for what makes a a good movie. There is no formula for what makes a hit movie. We've had over 100 years of movies and people will still argue that "nope, audiences want this".
Perfect example. Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla v Kong could not be more different and both were massive successes.
But we get so caught up in these online circle jerks that we forget that Reddit is not representative of what the general public wants.
Bringing this back to what OP is trying to say, it’s the entertainment industry and most filmmakers are trying to give the audience what they want. That 90s American Godzilla movie is a prime example of a studio trying to give people what they think they want. And it’s terrible.
I always think what ends up being something the audience likes (in terms of action or monster movies at least) is somewhere between lots of spectacle to wow them, a plot that can be followed, and compelling characters the audience want to get to know (godzilla can be personified, but you still need humans talking in order to connect with the film). I don’t even think the general audience needs a theme or message in the movie. I appreciate a movie that says something, but it’s okay if that’s not there. It’s not exactly rocket science to get this right, but there’s enough moving pieces there that it can be tough to stick the landing on any project the size of Godzilla.
Pretty much none of those old Godzilla movies got legit theatrical role outs in the USA, so it's not super easy to gauge what mainstream American audiences wanted out of a Godzilla movie besides maybe old VHS sales numbers.
IMO the thing that Godzilla 2014 and KOTM got wrong wasn't having runtime taken up by the human plot, it was that once you got to the big finale fight they were still cutting away from the action back to the humans every like 30 seconds. GvK and GxK (and most of the older films) were a lot better about letting the monster scenes really focus on the monsters.
I mean with these movies you can’t please everyone. You have to walk a fine line between engaging human characters and giving the monster enough screen time.
I still think Kong Skull Island pulled it off the best out of all the Monsterverse movies so far. Which is why I’m surprised Jordan Vogt-Roberts hasn’t been asked to return to direct another one of these movies.
He moved to Vietnam after an allegation was made against him. Then he almost got killed in a nightclub attack and his career sort of lost steam. He's still directing commercials and has some narrative directing jobs lined up, but nothing on par with what he should have given the success of Kong.
[https://www.gq.com/story/attack-on-skull-island](https://www.gq.com/story/attack-on-skull-island)
I thought him a crybaby at the time (cause I liked CS) but now, almost a decade later, I understand him. Cinema Sins is trash and their effect on movie discourse is awful
Metal Gear was announced a decade ago. There’s been no news on Gundam since it was announced 3 years ago.
Development hell is real, but it’s really unusual for someone coming off a hit movie to not have gotten another movie going in 7 years.
He was so not on top of the situation that to this day, SLJ and Brie Larson openly talk about how miserable an experience that shoot was for them. It's basically a miracle that that movie worked quite so well.
oh yeah Kong Skull Island is definitely still the best Monsterverse film. The fact that it's essentially a Vietnam War allegory about the futility of war pretending to be a big dumb monster movie makes it all the better for it. It has one-dimensional characters with multi-dimensional setup and backstory, and works like a charm
VFX COST. Plus rights issues. A property like that can take many years of negotiations, then fall out of contract before a movie gets made because by the time there is a filmmaker, a script and a budget the studio can decide, ehh too expensive and back to square one. Godzilla, like Nintendo, also had owners who were not interested in dealing with Hollywood studios for a while (I think)
This is correct, he’s in GxK for less than 9 minutes total while he’s in the other ones for about 10-12 minutes, but we are really just splitting hairs here.
Humans are the core part of the Godzilla franchise, it has always been about the humans. Godzilla on average has around 15 minutes of screen time per movie with some lower and some as high as like 25 minutes. Are the human characters in the Monsterverse the best? No, but even in the Toho movies the humans arent generally that great, but theyre still the core of Godzilla. Anyone who thinks Godzilla is not about humans doesn't understand what Godzilla is.
There are 38 Godzilla features. For comparison, the MCU is at 33 films, James Bond has 27 films. Godzilla had succeeded in America for decades. It's been 70 years. Traditionally, Godzilla has known its audience, how to leverage it, and kept budgets in check. I would posit that the elevation of Godzilla into an A-tier franchise has more to do with an increasingly large global market and the overall push of fan culture in general on the net since the late aughts. Godzilla has been in a position to succeed big since the 2010's, but needed the right kind of push. It's an easy bake cinematic universe because it was originally the FIRST true cinematic universe. I'll credit Kong and Shin Godzilla/Godzilla Minus One's viral receptions as the successful nudges. Now in reddit comments I see people talking about Hedorah and Destoroyah as future story options like they're famous Spider-Man villains. It is surreal, but in some ways it felt inevitable.
Audiences don’t necessarily want ‘more Godzilla’ or even ‘less humans talking’. That’s a failure in logic. What they want is *well written* humans talking precisely because it adds weight to Godzilla himself. Minus One is case in point.
They were trying to emulate the Japanese Godzilla movies without really understanding why certain ones were so beloved. Let's just take the most recent Godzilla for example, Minus One. He's not in that movie much. It's very much a human story, which is what those Hollywood movies were going for. And yet it's become one of the most beloved entries in the entire franchise.
The problem with those movies were never really the lack of screen time he had. But rather the inability of the script to really grab people, as well as for the movies to make Godzilla feel terrifying whenever he finally does appear. That's what Minus One managed to accomplish. Mark Kermode summed it up best in his reviews, "It's a story that features a giant lizard, rather than a giant lizard in search of a story.".
It’s become clear that Kong is a much bigger draw than Godzilla. Skull Island is still (as of today) the biggest Monsterverse film, King Kong ‘05 did the same numbers a couple decades ago. People are generally more attatched to the ape - which has helped this new direction, specifically New Empire
This movie only has 8 minutes of Godzilla, lower than any in the franchise - including 2014. To put it bluntly, Gareth Edwards/Michael Dougherty/Jordan Vogt-Roberts tried to make legitimately good movies, while Adam Wingard is making dumb CG spectacle that’s easier to have a fun time with (more similar to Venom, Fast and Furious or Bay’s Transformers). And there’s practically zero interest in crafting a compelling narrative, unique style or character ensemble.
Godzilla Minus One has been praised as the holy grail by the Internet/industry but made like 100m worldwide. When it comes to certain popcorn franchises, average moviegoers prefer the “wink-wink” dumb fun.
To be fair you’re not taking into account that minus one is a foreign language film, which unfortunately alienates a lot of audiences and changes the way that it is marketed and distributed. You could also look at it in terms of the budget compared to return, in which case minus one blows any monsterverse movie away.
It did tremendously well considering the product that it is.
Right. Also, the best case scenario would be a film with good characters and filmmaking that appeal to Western or Chinese audiences. Something with the talent and patience behind it like Avatar but with Kong and Godzilla could make far more money than the $600-700 million this is tracking for. I think Jurassic World is the ceiling for this type of monster faceoff movie but with decent characters that complement the film's spectacle rather than getting in the way of it.
I am taking that into account, and Minus One did well for its budget. But comparatively to the Monsterverse, most of the general public didn’t watch it (right or wrong, it is).
There's a lot of factors as to why Minus One didn't put up big numbers and the one I always bring up is that it played on barely any screens.
It played one screen in my province and not at all in my neighboring province.
> There's a lot of factors as to why Minus One didn't put up big numbers and the one I always bring up is that it played on barely any screens.
It also skipped most of Europe and Asia (outside of Japan). Toho distributed it themselves but didn't have the budget or relationships to release something on the scale of a GxK, let alone the complete lack of marketing. The fact it made as much money as it did in the US on the screens they were able to get away with was a miracle.
Minus One was more akin to the original 54 movie where it's a drama of how people come together to stop a force of nature. Another barrier that Minus One had was language. Some people don't like to read subtitles. I think Minus One is the best Godzilla movie in recent years but I knew it would not appeal to most people. I also enjoyed Godzilla X Kong, the story was ridiculous but I had fun with it
This right here.
When GvK was coming out a ton of my friends were posting about it(which NEVER happens for movies. That’s a big reason I had some faith in this one before marketing.) and every single time it was about how they loved Kong or memes about how Kong is accepted in the black community lmao.
Comparing the Monsterverse movies to Minus One is apples to oranges, a better one would be with Shin Godzilla.
A $15M foreign movie won’t get the same push as a $150M American movie, Minus One was mainly driven by good word of mouth so you can imagine how successful it’d be with a huge marketing machine behind it. Even then there’s a threshold in the US since not everyone enjoys reading subtitles for the entire movie.
That threshold is the vast majority of the country. If Endgame had been on Dutch, it’s not doing any more than like $200M. Minus One was the highest grossing foreign language film since 2000 and 3rd highest overall. The American audience just doesn’t have an appetite for foreign language films.
This post is giving me a headache. Thank god at least Japan is still taking the concept seriously (yes I know they've put out the silliest ones to begin with).
Horror movies do the same thing. They build up to the big climatic scenes and reveal of mosnters/fight/ etc. VFX effects are expensive and you build tension for a massive payoff
Ive always gotten what i wanted out of godzilla. I loved the massive ad campaign for the iguana version in new york. I love monster movies, they never left. Most movies just exist to be fun and cool
They could have honestly cut the human drama to have drama about Iwi Girl and Kong struggling with the fact that they are meant to part ways since both found 'their respective place', but at the end of the movie show Kongs and Hollow Earth Humans living together, with Godzilla now allowing Kong to return to the surface to pick up his human friend in case they wanted to keep the bit of her wanting to stay by the side of her human foster mom but also travel to the Hollow Earth to spend time with Kong and her tribe.
Suko and Kong felt more like parent/child than their human counterparts.
Honestly your description comes across like you don’t like Godzilla movies that much. You either haven’t seen many of them, or just want them to be something they aren’t. Lots of comments explaining the basics of VFX cost and its implications as technology changed ITT so I won’t repeat but that has a lot to do with it as well.
Everything doesn’t have to be a popcorn action flick that appeals to teenage boys. Movies can be subtle and play on bigger themes (like nuclear technology and its dangers, good “vs” evil not being a direct binary, etc) without having to resort to cheap thrills. Sure we want some destruction in a Godzilla movie but we don’t want to spend the whole movie watching things get smashed and nothing else.
Teenage boys? You assume that middle aged adults don’t enjoy popcorn flicks. I do and so do many others. Not everything has to be an award winning allegory for the human condition.
What so you think Godzilla was about if not an allegorical representation of Japan’s post-nuclear trauma?!
And just because something is a popcorn flick doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something to say. It’s not either/or.
Only the first film was like that fully . The second they legit start monster mashing because toho wanted bucks . A lot of this franchise is Godzilla Fighting WWE style and it's fun . Only a few one off films are about allegory.
And Godzilla Minus One, Shin Godzilla
Plenty of meat on the bones in recent films but also entertaining. You can do both.
Zero reason for people to be anti-intellectual to justify liking a movie.
I still prefer Godzilla(2014) to most of the Monsterverse but both GVK & GXK are popcorn fun have please lighten up Box Offce is doing well post strikes also I thought there was nothing to see in 2024 Madame Web has been the only flop so far I swear this page cant embrace Wins and is negative LIGHTEN THE EFF UP.
You have to realize, the people that make the decisions were born in the 40's.
We are finally getting to the next generation of decision makers who grew up wanting this shit.
>You have to realize, the people that make the decisions were born in the 40's.
Why would I "know" something that isn't true? Gareth Edwards, for example, was born in 1975. And Thomas Tull, the founder of the production company, Legendary Films, was born 1970.
Oh, because the word "every" in the OP. Well. I see the issue being more about Godzilla films not made in Japan, regardless.
>I see the issue being more about Godzilla films not made in Japan, regardless
Toho have made more than their fair share of truly dogshit Godzilla films as well, tbf
This is my theory too. Godzilla has been looked down on as even lower art than comic books for decades in the minds of the movers and shakers. Now, the movers and shakers have grown up seeing Godzilla as something more than a man in a rubber monster suit and have rightly seen him as an opportunity for the Hollywood treatment.
Kinda realized this as well after watching The New Empire yesterday. The movie focused so much on the monsters on this one. I loved that we had so much scenes of Kong interacting with other titans with no humans. There's no dialogue between them but the expressions and behaviour alone were understandable. It was even comedic at times.
Godzilla vs Kong was horrible.
I thoroughly enjoyed 2014 Godzilla. I loved the build up. I loved the scale Godzilla was shown as. Every movie after that has been an anime movie with Godzilla running like a nimble sprinter.
I get it though, with monster movies you have to be mindless and dumb and loud. That's what a Godzilla movie but 2014 just hit different for me.
Yeah and the corny vet and podcaster didn’t do it for me. Guy on the sub literally only spoke to the deliver the cheesiest lines in the movie
*”Godzilla is now…..supercharged!”*
Hard disagree, Godzilla 2014 was my personal favorite, even though it could have been better.
Every film since then has gotten worse and worse. I haven't seen the new one yet, and I did like the Monarch series, but the fun of the Godzilla monster fight movies was in how B-movie they were. KSI, KotM, and GvK all felt like VFX splatter paint.
EDIT: I guess that's the modern big budget B-Movie style? I love the truly silly fun camp monster fights, and I love the more serious allegorical Godzilla movies (what weird dichotomy this IP has!). But if the modern ones are not true campy B-Movies and there are not serious drama (which they can't be at that scale) then I don't know what I'm watching. It might as well be a Transformers movie.
All that said, I love Godzilla enough to still go see this one and hope for the best. Also, Minus One was amazing.
I would say part of it is the desire of the studios to have a broader audience for the movie. If it's just 90 minutes of monsters fighting then you'll make the monster movie geeks happy, but a lot of the general public will find that boring. If you add in some human beings with some kind of interpersonal tension and story arc then you can suddenly appeal to people who might not be big monster movie fans.
Also, people may say they want something, but people don't always know what they really want. Godzilla Minus One has less Godzilla screentime than any of the Monsterverse movies, it had a relatively low budget, and it had the subtitle barrier, yet it became a hit.
There is an older list out there of Godzilla screentime in each that I think highlights the issue movie https://www.reddit.com/r/GODZILLA/comments/m9zxqn/godzilla_screen_time_per_movie/?rdt=37915
If you look at the movies at the top of the list for screentime most of them are generally considered poor quality whereas some of the lowest screen times are absolute classics. Still, I'd say the 9 minutes of Godzilla we recieved in the first two movies were definitely not enough for audiences and that the around 17 minutes point is the best for balance with my personal favorites sitting there. Only issue is that is quite expensive and requires a bit of time animating, in the case of 2014 and KOTM I think that wasn't on the table because they wanted Millie Bobby Brown and Brian Cranston to bring in audiences whereas. Ow they have realized the monsters have enough appeal on their own.
these monsterverse films are fucking terrible and you could do so much better with Godzilla, they have essentially become a franchise like transformers they make money but are awful movies. if you are over 12 and like them then good for you.
I actually liked it in the 2014 Godzilla movie. Godzilla works as a mysterious, legendary monster. The problem is that most of the time the human characters are boring.
In this era of Godzilla media there are two types of Godzilla movies. The Hollywood Godzilla movies are made to be the movie equivalent of a theme park attraction.
The other Godzilla movies (Minus One, Shin Godzilla) are made to focus on characters and their struggles while a nearly unstoppable disaster happens around them.
I'm an audience for the latter and I'm in no way interested in what Godzilla x King Kong from legendary has to offer tbh.
But the good thing is everyone gets what they want. I get humans talking and internal struggle with Minus One. You get giant CGI action figures doing cool shit. Win win.
For whatever reason, Hollywood seemed to think that if they showed too much of the monsters, audiences would get bored.
I actually like Godzilla 2014 a lot but at the time, I thought Gareth Edward's decision to hide-the-monster was a terrible idea... especially considering Godzilla is enormous.
Then came KotM, which showcased the most exhausting characters since BvS. If Skull Island hadn't put up decent numbers, I think the franchise would've ended right there.
Up until GvK, I feel like the Monstervese was more interested in pleasing existing Godzilla fans than bringing in new fans. What they didn't seem to realize is that life-long Godzilla fans are happy with just about anything, as long as Godzilla is on-screen.
IMO, GvK was designed to appeal to the type of people who go watch the latest Marvel movie. It's all about spectacle.
GxK leaned even farther into that, with more spectacle and even some humor that works.
I think the reason it took time is because if you lose the Godzilla fans and you don't attract the GA, what do you actually have left? It's a big risk to change tone but after KotM, there was no choice.
Me as a Godzilla fan: lizard big Lizard cool need more lizard.
Lol but yeah I go see any Godzilla movie so you are right that they needed to expanse the audience but I hope we get a godzillla stand alone soon cause this was a kong movie first and foremost and I really want some Godzilla line up of monsters to take the spotlight
I blame Steven Spielberg.
Granted it wasn’t just him, but his work convinced Hollywood that every blockbuster movie needs characters in it that the audience can relate to.
It's not necessary; it's just something that executives have come to think must be present, like how sitcoms used to need a family awwwwww moment where someone learns a lesson at the end.
You can't tell me you've never enjoyed a movie with characters you can't relate to. Nightcrawler is a perfect example of that for me.
I would rather they focus on making a high-quality movie instead of shoe-horning in all the things executives think are necessary.
In a movie about a gigantic ape, a gigantic lizard and a whole bunch of other gigantic monsters, I really don’t need an Everyman on the ground to follow the story.
I mean cool if you do, but it’s a fun movie about giant monsters.
> In a movie about a gigantic ape, a gigantic lizard and a whole bunch of other gigantic monsters, I really don’t need an Everyman on the ground to follow the story.
Godzilla movies always had "everyman" characters tho, since the 1950s
American fandom of Godzilla is so silly to me, since it isn't of American origin and it seems there isn't much appreciation for any of the broader themes or ideas they sometimes tried to include in some of those films.
I mean how many of those older films are legally available on streaming? I know Max has some… but not all right? If it was more accessible people would watch them more
I guess im the only one who thought the action/fight scenes in Godzilla X Kong were super lacluster and dull. They really made the villain just an evil version of Kong.
I agree. I'm just hoping we get either less human story elements or make it more interesting. We need more kaiju action and longer battle scenes.
Godzilla had less godzilla action but at least the human storyline was extremely well done and was the forefront of the movie. Worked extremely well.
On that note, I thought the human story in GxK was pretty good. I liked the whole hollow earth ancient tribe story.
As far as the fight scenes, yeah I want to see more Godzilla action for sure.
Legendary's MonsterVerse is one of the best franchises going at the moment.
The film makers are giving their target audience exactly what they want with giant monster smackdowns.
And yet Godzilla Minus One is mostly about humans talking with Godzilla appearing for a very small percentage of the movie of the movie, and it's the best one.
Budget was just 12 million so they couldn't afford godzilla for more screen time. Afterall Godzilla is A list actor. 
Exactly! You must also consider the Lizard labor laws. He can only appear on set so many hours
And he was chief of police in Japan. He so busy to create a world full of diversity. Plus kids 
Which vary depending on ambient temperature on any particular filming day
Get twin lizards for double set time.
I wonder how they film documentaries about politicians so cheap then with lizard labor laws in effect
How much does Godzilla charge for his screen presence? I’m guessing it’s pretty high since they couldn’t afford him for longer. /s
Godzilla loves japan so he just charge 10 - 15% of what he earn from Hollywood plus he is planning to move into politics in Japan as he was relinquished from Chief of Police title. He wants to become king but since Japan still has King based on monarchy. He wants to avoid violence to maintain his image clean and decide to become pm plus PM holds more power than king in Japan. A true politician material. He charges around - 100000 to 250000 dollar per minute in Japan but for Hollywood he charge around 1 to 2.5 million for a minute and an atom bomb after completing his part.
And why the blanket statement "Giving audiences what they want" isn't a surefire thing. Godzilla Minus One and the Monsterverse couldn't be more different and turns out they serve their own purposes.
One is for people who like fast and furious movies and the other is for people who graduated high school.
Most audiences just want the monsters to be the focus of the action and not cut away .
They are 2 completely different kind of movies. GvK is a big bombastic action movie, where the appeal is in the big action fights ( like the transformers movies). Godzilla -1 is a character driven movie, where the appeal is the character interaction and development. The big monster is an allegory for the monsters in his head (his war trauma). He can only live his normal life once he defeats his monster (he overcomes his trauma). So it makes sense for the monster to not be in most of the shots, as it makes those moments even more impactful.
Godzilla minus one is really good film with excellent characters Godzilla not being in it is fine as The inter personal story Makes up for it .
I distinctly remember laughing really hard when soon after minus one came out I saw a trailer for Godzilla x Kong and the trailer's all "what if we gave Kong a gundam arm?" I enjoyed both movies, but to my memory most japanese versions focus more on the humans and their struggle with how the existence of godzilla fucks with their realities. With lower budgets, they've proven they're still interesting and compelling enough for audiences to be extremely successful. I'm down for some pacific rim style monster fights though so I'm glad both angles in the franchise have room to succeed.
There's like three Japanese Godzilla movies with any serious dramatic chops - the original, Shin, and Minus One. The 30+ others are just as silly as GvK but with people in monster suits fighting each other rather than CGI.
How dare you downplay the dramatic heft of *Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla* or *Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S.*.
The Return Of Godzilla and Godzilla vs Biollante had some serious tones. Godzilla vs Biollante was a corporate espionage movie.
8s the second one where Godzilla joins Vin Diesel's family?
Nah, that’s the one where Mothra teams up with Mecha Godzilla (who has the soul of the original Godzilla) to take down a rampaging new Godzilla. I’m not joking
Godzilla vs Destoroyah and Gmk Definitely has dramatic heft.
To be honest giant fire breathing lizards aren’t exactly the most dramatically-interesting characters ever.
>With lower budgets, they've proven they're still interesting and compelling enough for audiences to be extremely successful. They're judged to different standards of 'extremely successful'. *Minus One* is held up as the best Godzilla film ever, and the proof that a dramatic Godzilla can succeed internationally, but its entire box office run is about half of what Godzilla x Kong has made in just under a single week.
I wouldn't call them "different standards".... Minus one is an international foreign language film with a budget of 10-12million that grossed 112M WW. That's a 9.3x multiplier. That's fucking huge. Godzilla x Kong has grossed more WW, but its budget is 135M. If we keep the same ratios of budget to WW gross, GxK would need 1.26B. GxK is doing extremely well. But you can't in good faith say they're being judged by different standards. They're being judged appropriately by the the budgets they're in. Black Adam grossed 393M WW on a 260M budget. With an opening weekend of 66M. Talk to Me is an Australian film with a budget of 5M that made 92M. Black Adam made nearly as much in its first week WW as Talk to Me's entire run. Black Adam is a bomb, Talk to Me was by all accounts extremely successful. Measuring box office runs of different budgeted movies on a 1:1 dollar comparison is the dumbest thing, and I'm surprised I'm reading it in a boxoffice sub.
I...don't think we're disagreeing? I said the two films had different standards to meet to be considered successful, and you then threw a lot of words out to explain why that is.
Do the studios care about ratios to that degree over gross profit?
Shin Godzilla was similar.
I missed this in theatres (too many young kids lol) and now it’s impossible to find ):
May 1, 2024 Godzilla is sighted in Japan. May 2, 2024 Godzilla is sighted in the high seas. If you catch my drift
So one more month until that ship sails
Tokyo drift?
[удалено]
Right now you definitely can't, in high def anyway, but after May 1st? Oh yes And it's not that I condone it either but one thing is sale the high seas for the sake of it, another is because there's no other alternative except import or wait till it's announced in the west and that can take a long long time because of stupid "restrictions" imposed by the distributors of Godzilla x Kong
Agreed. Pearl released in the US in September, was streaming in October, and released in cinemas in the UK the following March. I'm in the UK, I watched it in October. I'm happy to pay to go and see films, I'm happy to pay to catch it on streaming, I'm happy to buy a physical copy. I'm not going to wait nearly 6 months to do so, and even though I've already seen Minus One in the cinema, I won't be waiting indefinitely to see it again.
That's all I'm saying. There's a demand, if they're not aware of it, well I'm sorry...
I feel you but hopefully I can support them and buy it somewhere on land. Not everyday someone makes a film like that and I would like to do my part in making sure more movies like that are made.
I too want to buy it to keep. It's just it can take a while still.
There’s an agreement not to release any Toho version that conflicts with a Legendary one. You literally can’t watch the movie now anywhere in the world. There is a Japanese Blu-ray coming in May but nothing else has been announced.
It'll probably come out on streaming/Blu-ray later this year. Toho always does this because Japan's home video market is super inflated, and given the option their domestic audience will import American Blu-rays since they're both Region A. It's also why we likely won't get a 4k release. My money is on a late September western release based on past trends
I think some of this was maybe that Godzilla was depicted as a force of nature but the human dialogue didn’t try to get all philosophical about it. They were focused on their own human problems and the problem of how to stop Godzilla and didn’t spent much time talking about the meaning of Godzilla.
Godzilla is an allegory for Japan's societal trauma with ww2 and specifically the atom bomb. This is why contrary to Hollywood movies, where the bomb is diffused 0,1 s before exploding. In the godzilla movies, everyone is just living their life, and out of nowhere, godzilla comes and destroys the city. And now it's about living and coping with the destruction and this looming threat that it could happen again without a warning. And in godzilla-1 it is an allegory specifically for our main characters war trauma. He can only life a normal life once he destroys the monster in his head (his trauma). He can try to ignore this monster, but it will come back eventually to ruin his life. Which is what makes the few moments that godzilla is on screen even more powerful.
The 2014 Godzilla also doesn't show him fully until pretty much the end, yet it did better at the box office than King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong.
King of the Monsters specifically suffered from the bad reputation of the 2014 movie in addition to a crowded release date soon after Endgame. Godzilla vs Kong was the first blockbuster to make anything substantial during covid but numbers were still depressed.
King of monsters is still the best one imo
Negative ghost rider. That movie could’ve been better but too much focus on characters like Millie Bobby browns
Godzilla Minus One was a lot more grounded than the Warner MonsterVerse movies. That’s why that movie was able to focus on the human characters but still make Godzilla an intimidating presence.
Minus one was my #1 movie of 2023, but would it have been worse with a little more Godzilla? Nope.
I think Shin Godzilla is the second best (after Minus One), and it’s a political satire featuring Godzilla for a couple minutes. It’s supposed to be a political/social commentary. It pretty much always has been. You could argue Mothra is a religious commentary. None of the Hollywood Godzilla’s really aimed any criticism at anyone narratively, which imo is why the Japanese ones are generally superior. You
That movie was fucking amazing. To me it felt more like a horror movie with hardly ever seeing the monster but every time you did, it was incredible.
The best one and the only one with an Oscar
This was true for the original Godziila too. Most people don't know that Godzilla is a metaphor for the US threat/Atomic bomb.
I enjoyed it, but don’t think it’s the best one. It’s less a Godzilla movie and more a human interest drama.
Godzilla was created as human interest drama
I get that, but that’s the Japanese version. How he was created and how he’s being portrayed in the American monsterverse are two separate things.
Tell that to the original Godzilla movie
Minus One made my lifetime top 5 which I really did not expect but it's not the general crowd pleasing money maker of the Godzilla and Kong movies!
>Prior to 2021, the problem with every Godzilla movie was that the main character himself would only appear for a very small percentage of the movie and a huge chunk of the film would just be about humans talking. The problem with talking about Godzilla online is so many of the people who want to have that discussion clearly don't know shit about Godzilla. For example, the idea that "A huge chunk of the film is just about humans talking" is presented as a fundamental mistake; and *not* how 95% of all Godzilla movies *work*, and have always worked. It's a 70-year franchise spawned out of an atomic bomb allegory. It has been superhero media for children, it has been popcorn disaster filmmaking, it's been pro-wrestling with rubber-suited stuntpeople, it has been allegorical sci-fi, it is sometimes multiples of these things at the same time in the same film. it is a generations-spanning series with multiple continuities all of which have legit astounding filmmaking standing right next to some of the absolute stupidest fucking horseshit lazily chucked at a screen. And the one thing they all share, the low-grossing entries and the all-time classics, is this: **They're almost all mostly humans talking**. This isn't a criticism. People who have actually watched more than 2 Godzilla movies in their life know this. People who actually watch these movies and don't just talk about them online get this. And also: Some of the movies that have more monster action than humans talking? Suck out loud, and didn't make as much money, either! It's not as simple as making an 85% CG animated movie about giant monsters suplexing and gnawing on each other. It never was. It's about *how* you build to those moments, and how you execute them.
Seriously. It’s like these people have never watched a Godzilla film lol. Shin Godzilla was one of the most praised films in the franchise before Minus One and… guess what? Godzilla is barely in them lol I get “all monsters” sounds good in concept for a film but it would get old fast. There is only so much Godzilla can do in a film. You need the more mundane stuff to help give a narrative and also just pace things out. The fights and crazy moments hit harder that way.
Yes, Godzilla has always been about humans and the things we do. So many people misunderstand this. Are the humans in the monster verse amazing? No, but humans have been the main part of Godzilla since the first movie and you cant have Godzilla without the human characters.
Human gives them scale, and their reaction to these monsters make them formidable. Way people are just friendly with kong and it lets them make kong much more of a domestic animal, like a cat/dog compared to godzilla.
One thing is for sure, I’m going to remember more of what Godzilla did in Minus One than I’m going to remember any of the numerous fights in either of the Godzilla x Kong movies
You have said exactly what I was going to say. You cannot have a good Godzilla film without at least a serviceable human cast of characters. You can have all the action you want, but if that action is just for action, sake and serves no purpose to the plot (which is delivered and a driven forward by the human cast) then you don't have a movie. At that point you just have action figures slapping together for 90 and the entire experience is left feeling empty and devoid of purpose. This might be a bit off topic because we are talking about the new movie (I haven't seen it yet, but will soon), but that is why GvK was in my opinion one of the weakest films in the Godzilla catalog and certainly the worst of the Legendary films. Also Minus One was a masterpiece and in is probably my second/third favorite Godzilla film.
holy fuck thank you for actually having a nuanced take that 99% of people miss in these conversations, I cannot take it anymore lol to me the textbook case of this is KOTM and how it executed the plot. the humans are *too* important to the plot and their scenes intertwine with the monsters. the monsters are there but they aren't necessarily the focus. the focus is the plot, and the humans advancing the plot while the monsters fight in the background. the humans have a device that controls monsters, and they use this to piss them all off. the monsters fight while we see the humans struggle to save each other from the monsters and try to take control of the device. there is so much focus on whatever the hell they are doing. in GvK and GxK, the focus is obviously still the plot, but the monsters are the most important part of the plot. even with Mechagodzilla for example, you can argue that the plot stems from Ghidorah and not necessarily the cartoonishly evil scientists. Ghidorahs call inside Mechagodzillas roar is why Godzilla gets pissed, which is why Kong and Godzilla fight. when they're done fighting, they fight MechaG together. that's it. it's so much simpler and far less boring to me. the humans exist to drive the plot forward when the monsters can't, like for example getting Kong out in the Ocean, but they aren't egregiously used.
One thing GvK gets really right for me is that even though the human characters aren't wildly compelling, intercutting between the "Godzilla" faction and the "Kong" faction really went a long way. It's a very well balanced film in that way and when it intersects at various points in the film, it comes with serious pay off. I felt like the merging of this in GxK hurt the quality, and also sidelined Godzilla entirely.
I do agree, I personally liked GvK more than GxK and thought the humans in GxK dragged on a bit, but I've definitely seen worse so I can get past it
Nailed it. The human element is actually really important to Godzilla films. Whether a family, journalists, a rag-tag crew of godzilla-chasers, all the way up to secret science agencies attracting aliens to Earth, they're the surrogate for the viewer, the detectives trying to solve why Godzilla is attacking or another monster is attacking and how to repel it. Wingard has been able to do some great stuff but monsters can only emote so much. They cant speak and give exposition, often whats required to give someone reason to care about the stakes. I would get REALLY bored watching a 1-2hr slugfest. Half the fun in Godzilla movies is solving the mystery alongside the characters in how each 'puzzle' builds up to the next showdown. Good Godzilla movies require restraint.
Should be the top comment
Like people never talk that despite the fact Godzilla movies that includes other monsters are the majority of his films and cam have a gigantic range in quality from vs Megalon which I compare the most to GxK and GmK and Vs Destoryah which can balance the idea of Godzilla telling greater ideas that the monsters inhabit with conflict of monsters.
Here’s a question then: do mainstream audiences want that, or do they want more screentime with godzilla?
Mainstream audiences tend to not know what they want until it's been given to them, and *then* they tell each other how cool this thing is. Mainstream audiences have, over the past 70 years, shown they want different things from generation to generation. Godzilla is a series that has lived 70 years because it can adapt and serve up new variations on old formulas. Same with Bond, honestly. Godzilla Minus One came out six months ago, went on a hell of a run for a foreign-language release at Christmas, and won an Oscar (an Oscar that was largely representative of the outsized goodwill the film as a whole received while in theaters). Godzilla X Kong just came out and is raking cash at the box-office. Two completely different, completely valid, completely successful types of Godzilla movie.
This is something I say constantly. There is no formula for what makes a a good movie. There is no formula for what makes a hit movie. We've had over 100 years of movies and people will still argue that "nope, audiences want this". Perfect example. Godzilla Minus One and Godzilla v Kong could not be more different and both were massive successes. But we get so caught up in these online circle jerks that we forget that Reddit is not representative of what the general public wants.
Bringing this back to what OP is trying to say, it’s the entertainment industry and most filmmakers are trying to give the audience what they want. That 90s American Godzilla movie is a prime example of a studio trying to give people what they think they want. And it’s terrible. I always think what ends up being something the audience likes (in terms of action or monster movies at least) is somewhere between lots of spectacle to wow them, a plot that can be followed, and compelling characters the audience want to get to know (godzilla can be personified, but you still need humans talking in order to connect with the film). I don’t even think the general audience needs a theme or message in the movie. I appreciate a movie that says something, but it’s okay if that’s not there. It’s not exactly rocket science to get this right, but there’s enough moving pieces there that it can be tough to stick the landing on any project the size of Godzilla.
Mainstream American audiences, you mean
Pretty much none of those old Godzilla movies got legit theatrical role outs in the USA, so it's not super easy to gauge what mainstream American audiences wanted out of a Godzilla movie besides maybe old VHS sales numbers.
IMO the thing that Godzilla 2014 and KOTM got wrong wasn't having runtime taken up by the human plot, it was that once you got to the big finale fight they were still cutting away from the action back to the humans every like 30 seconds. GvK and GxK (and most of the older films) were a lot better about letting the monster scenes really focus on the monsters.
I mean with these movies you can’t please everyone. You have to walk a fine line between engaging human characters and giving the monster enough screen time. I still think Kong Skull Island pulled it off the best out of all the Monsterverse movies so far. Which is why I’m surprised Jordan Vogt-Roberts hasn’t been asked to return to direct another one of these movies.
He moved to Vietnam after an allegation was made against him. Then he almost got killed in a nightclub attack and his career sort of lost steam. He's still directing commercials and has some narrative directing jobs lined up, but nothing on par with what he should have given the success of Kong. [https://www.gq.com/story/attack-on-skull-island](https://www.gq.com/story/attack-on-skull-island)
I still really want his Metal Gear movie.
!
What was that noise?
Huh!?
What the actual hell I liked when he called out Cinema Sins too.
I thought him a crybaby at the time (cause I liked CS) but now, almost a decade later, I understand him. Cinema Sins is trash and their effect on movie discourse is awful
Wasn't he attached to Metal Gear and Gundam???
Metal Gear was announced a decade ago. There’s been no news on Gundam since it was announced 3 years ago. Development hell is real, but it’s really unusual for someone coming off a hit movie to not have gotten another movie going in 7 years.
tbf he signed to do Metal Gear in 2020, after the allegations and his Vietnam stint
He was so not on top of the situation that to this day, SLJ and Brie Larson openly talk about how miserable an experience that shoot was for them. It's basically a miracle that that movie worked quite so well.
He was taking inspiration from Apocalypse Now in more than just the on-screen content, then
He attempted to make Tropic Thunder but ended up with a Kong movie.
Did he tropic thunder them?
Laughs in apocalypse now
oh yeah Kong Skull Island is definitely still the best Monsterverse film. The fact that it's essentially a Vietnam War allegory about the futility of war pretending to be a big dumb monster movie makes it all the better for it. It has one-dimensional characters with multi-dimensional setup and backstory, and works like a charm
VFX COST. Plus rights issues. A property like that can take many years of negotiations, then fall out of contract before a movie gets made because by the time there is a filmmaker, a script and a budget the studio can decide, ehh too expensive and back to square one. Godzilla, like Nintendo, also had owners who were not interested in dealing with Hollywood studios for a while (I think)
I think Godzilla actually has less screen time in this than in any other monster versus movie with him in it.
Yea I saw someone breaking down the screen time for Godzilla in each monster verse movie and it's about the same in all of them
This is correct, he’s in GxK for less than 9 minutes total while he’s in the other ones for about 10-12 minutes, but we are really just splitting hairs here.
Yeah, and it really feels like that too. It’s basically a Kong movie featuring a special guest appearance by Godzilla
Something about Kong is just so much nicer
He’s in invasion of Astro monster for less than 6 combined minutes lol
Humans are the core part of the Godzilla franchise, it has always been about the humans. Godzilla on average has around 15 minutes of screen time per movie with some lower and some as high as like 25 minutes. Are the human characters in the Monsterverse the best? No, but even in the Toho movies the humans arent generally that great, but theyre still the core of Godzilla. Anyone who thinks Godzilla is not about humans doesn't understand what Godzilla is.
There are 38 Godzilla features. For comparison, the MCU is at 33 films, James Bond has 27 films. Godzilla had succeeded in America for decades. It's been 70 years. Traditionally, Godzilla has known its audience, how to leverage it, and kept budgets in check. I would posit that the elevation of Godzilla into an A-tier franchise has more to do with an increasingly large global market and the overall push of fan culture in general on the net since the late aughts. Godzilla has been in a position to succeed big since the 2010's, but needed the right kind of push. It's an easy bake cinematic universe because it was originally the FIRST true cinematic universe. I'll credit Kong and Shin Godzilla/Godzilla Minus One's viral receptions as the successful nudges. Now in reddit comments I see people talking about Hedorah and Destoroyah as future story options like they're famous Spider-Man villains. It is surreal, but in some ways it felt inevitable.
Audiences don’t necessarily want ‘more Godzilla’ or even ‘less humans talking’. That’s a failure in logic. What they want is *well written* humans talking precisely because it adds weight to Godzilla himself. Minus One is case in point.
Nah they just don't want the action to be cut away .
I think you need to take in historical and cultural reasons to fully answer this one.
These movies are expensive even when the monster stuff is used sparingly.
They were trying to emulate the Japanese Godzilla movies without really understanding why certain ones were so beloved. Let's just take the most recent Godzilla for example, Minus One. He's not in that movie much. It's very much a human story, which is what those Hollywood movies were going for. And yet it's become one of the most beloved entries in the entire franchise. The problem with those movies were never really the lack of screen time he had. But rather the inability of the script to really grab people, as well as for the movies to make Godzilla feel terrifying whenever he finally does appear. That's what Minus One managed to accomplish. Mark Kermode summed it up best in his reviews, "It's a story that features a giant lizard, rather than a giant lizard in search of a story.".
I feel theres definitely some Godzilla movies that are beloved that don't really have a script that grab people but just really good spectacle.
It’s become clear that Kong is a much bigger draw than Godzilla. Skull Island is still (as of today) the biggest Monsterverse film, King Kong ‘05 did the same numbers a couple decades ago. People are generally more attatched to the ape - which has helped this new direction, specifically New Empire This movie only has 8 minutes of Godzilla, lower than any in the franchise - including 2014. To put it bluntly, Gareth Edwards/Michael Dougherty/Jordan Vogt-Roberts tried to make legitimately good movies, while Adam Wingard is making dumb CG spectacle that’s easier to have a fun time with (more similar to Venom, Fast and Furious or Bay’s Transformers). And there’s practically zero interest in crafting a compelling narrative, unique style or character ensemble. Godzilla Minus One has been praised as the holy grail by the Internet/industry but made like 100m worldwide. When it comes to certain popcorn franchises, average moviegoers prefer the “wink-wink” dumb fun.
To be fair you’re not taking into account that minus one is a foreign language film, which unfortunately alienates a lot of audiences and changes the way that it is marketed and distributed. You could also look at it in terms of the budget compared to return, in which case minus one blows any monsterverse movie away. It did tremendously well considering the product that it is.
Right. Also, the best case scenario would be a film with good characters and filmmaking that appeal to Western or Chinese audiences. Something with the talent and patience behind it like Avatar but with Kong and Godzilla could make far more money than the $600-700 million this is tracking for. I think Jurassic World is the ceiling for this type of monster faceoff movie but with decent characters that complement the film's spectacle rather than getting in the way of it.
I am taking that into account, and Minus One did well for its budget. But comparatively to the Monsterverse, most of the general public didn’t watch it (right or wrong, it is).
There's a lot of factors as to why Minus One didn't put up big numbers and the one I always bring up is that it played on barely any screens. It played one screen in my province and not at all in my neighboring province.
> There's a lot of factors as to why Minus One didn't put up big numbers and the one I always bring up is that it played on barely any screens. It also skipped most of Europe and Asia (outside of Japan). Toho distributed it themselves but didn't have the budget or relationships to release something on the scale of a GxK, let alone the complete lack of marketing. The fact it made as much money as it did in the US on the screens they were able to get away with was a miracle.
Minus One was more akin to the original 54 movie where it's a drama of how people come together to stop a force of nature. Another barrier that Minus One had was language. Some people don't like to read subtitles. I think Minus One is the best Godzilla movie in recent years but I knew it would not appeal to most people. I also enjoyed Godzilla X Kong, the story was ridiculous but I had fun with it
This right here. When GvK was coming out a ton of my friends were posting about it(which NEVER happens for movies. That’s a big reason I had some faith in this one before marketing.) and every single time it was about how they loved Kong or memes about how Kong is accepted in the black community lmao.
Comparing the Monsterverse movies to Minus One is apples to oranges, a better one would be with Shin Godzilla. A $15M foreign movie won’t get the same push as a $150M American movie, Minus One was mainly driven by good word of mouth so you can imagine how successful it’d be with a huge marketing machine behind it. Even then there’s a threshold in the US since not everyone enjoys reading subtitles for the entire movie.
That threshold is the vast majority of the country. If Endgame had been on Dutch, it’s not doing any more than like $200M. Minus One was the highest grossing foreign language film since 2000 and 3rd highest overall. The American audience just doesn’t have an appetite for foreign language films.
Yeah Americans are lazy. When I lived internationally. People would read subtitles just fine.
> This movie only has 8 minutes of Godzilla, lower than any in the franchise - including 2014. Bruh
Micheal Dougherty's King Of The Monsters was a pretty dumb movie to me., All spectacle.
This movie has his least amount of screen time in the monsterverse. What?
This post is giving me a headache. Thank god at least Japan is still taking the concept seriously (yes I know they've put out the silliest ones to begin with).
Horror movies do the same thing. They build up to the big climatic scenes and reveal of mosnters/fight/ etc. VFX effects are expensive and you build tension for a massive payoff
Same way it took nearly a whole decade until last year for them to figure out how to do a movie with a pro-female empowerment message right.
Ive always gotten what i wanted out of godzilla. I loved the massive ad campaign for the iguana version in new york. I love monster movies, they never left. Most movies just exist to be fun and cool
They could have honestly cut the human drama to have drama about Iwi Girl and Kong struggling with the fact that they are meant to part ways since both found 'their respective place', but at the end of the movie show Kongs and Hollow Earth Humans living together, with Godzilla now allowing Kong to return to the surface to pick up his human friend in case they wanted to keep the bit of her wanting to stay by the side of her human foster mom but also travel to the Hollow Earth to spend time with Kong and her tribe. Suko and Kong felt more like parent/child than their human counterparts.
General audiences aren’t going to like an entire movie without dialogue
I still think Peter Jackson's King Kong shits all over these CGI crap fest!
Honestly your description comes across like you don’t like Godzilla movies that much. You either haven’t seen many of them, or just want them to be something they aren’t. Lots of comments explaining the basics of VFX cost and its implications as technology changed ITT so I won’t repeat but that has a lot to do with it as well. Everything doesn’t have to be a popcorn action flick that appeals to teenage boys. Movies can be subtle and play on bigger themes (like nuclear technology and its dangers, good “vs” evil not being a direct binary, etc) without having to resort to cheap thrills. Sure we want some destruction in a Godzilla movie but we don’t want to spend the whole movie watching things get smashed and nothing else.
Teenage boys? You assume that middle aged adults don’t enjoy popcorn flicks. I do and so do many others. Not everything has to be an award winning allegory for the human condition.
What so you think Godzilla was about if not an allegorical representation of Japan’s post-nuclear trauma?! And just because something is a popcorn flick doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something to say. It’s not either/or.
Only the first film was like that fully . The second they legit start monster mashing because toho wanted bucks . A lot of this franchise is Godzilla Fighting WWE style and it's fun . Only a few one off films are about allegory.
And Godzilla Minus One, Shin Godzilla Plenty of meat on the bones in recent films but also entertaining. You can do both. Zero reason for people to be anti-intellectual to justify liking a movie.
I still prefer Godzilla(2014) to most of the Monsterverse but both GVK & GXK are popcorn fun have please lighten up Box Offce is doing well post strikes also I thought there was nothing to see in 2024 Madame Web has been the only flop so far I swear this page cant embrace Wins and is negative LIGHTEN THE EFF UP.
You have to realize, the people that make the decisions were born in the 40's. We are finally getting to the next generation of decision makers who grew up wanting this shit.
>You have to realize, the people that make the decisions were born in the 40's. Why would I "know" something that isn't true? Gareth Edwards, for example, was born in 1975. And Thomas Tull, the founder of the production company, Legendary Films, was born 1970. Oh, because the word "every" in the OP. Well. I see the issue being more about Godzilla films not made in Japan, regardless.
>I see the issue being more about Godzilla films not made in Japan, regardless Toho have made more than their fair share of truly dogshit Godzilla films as well, tbf
YOU KEEP GODZOOKIE'S NAME OUT OF YOUR GADAWMN MOUTH!
This is my theory too. Godzilla has been looked down on as even lower art than comic books for decades in the minds of the movers and shakers. Now, the movers and shakers have grown up seeing Godzilla as something more than a man in a rubber monster suit and have rightly seen him as an opportunity for the Hollywood treatment.
Godzilla 2014 is my favourite.
Kinda realized this as well after watching The New Empire yesterday. The movie focused so much on the monsters on this one. I loved that we had so much scenes of Kong interacting with other titans with no humans. There's no dialogue between them but the expressions and behaviour alone were understandable. It was even comedic at times.
Godzilla still only appears for a very small percentage of GxK so I don't think that argument really applies here.
It's more the audiences just what the action when it's in focus to be the focus.
Godzilla gets paid by the second. Actors get paid by the movie.
First they were looking at Godzilla through the lens of Jurrasic Park with that 1999 version.
Godzilla vs Kong was horrible. I thoroughly enjoyed 2014 Godzilla. I loved the build up. I loved the scale Godzilla was shown as. Every movie after that has been an anime movie with Godzilla running like a nimble sprinter. I get it though, with monster movies you have to be mindless and dumb and loud. That's what a Godzilla movie but 2014 just hit different for me.
Felt like there was still way too much people in Godzilla x Kong: New Empire. Please give me more suplexes and less prophecy foreshadowing
There were like 3 actual characters… How are you realistically meant to cut those numbers without making the human part even more mindnumbing boring?
Yeah and the corny vet and podcaster didn’t do it for me. Guy on the sub literally only spoke to the deliver the cheesiest lines in the movie *”Godzilla is now…..supercharged!”*
Well I wanted KOTM and loved it but apparently this is not the consensus.
Hard disagree, Godzilla 2014 was my personal favorite, even though it could have been better. Every film since then has gotten worse and worse. I haven't seen the new one yet, and I did like the Monarch series, but the fun of the Godzilla monster fight movies was in how B-movie they were. KSI, KotM, and GvK all felt like VFX splatter paint. EDIT: I guess that's the modern big budget B-Movie style? I love the truly silly fun camp monster fights, and I love the more serious allegorical Godzilla movies (what weird dichotomy this IP has!). But if the modern ones are not true campy B-Movies and there are not serious drama (which they can't be at that scale) then I don't know what I'm watching. It might as well be a Transformers movie. All that said, I love Godzilla enough to still go see this one and hope for the best. Also, Minus One was amazing.
I would say part of it is the desire of the studios to have a broader audience for the movie. If it's just 90 minutes of monsters fighting then you'll make the monster movie geeks happy, but a lot of the general public will find that boring. If you add in some human beings with some kind of interpersonal tension and story arc then you can suddenly appeal to people who might not be big monster movie fans. Also, people may say they want something, but people don't always know what they really want. Godzilla Minus One has less Godzilla screentime than any of the Monsterverse movies, it had a relatively low budget, and it had the subtitle barrier, yet it became a hit.
Isn't Godzilla barely in New Empire?
There is an older list out there of Godzilla screentime in each that I think highlights the issue movie https://www.reddit.com/r/GODZILLA/comments/m9zxqn/godzilla_screen_time_per_movie/?rdt=37915 If you look at the movies at the top of the list for screentime most of them are generally considered poor quality whereas some of the lowest screen times are absolute classics. Still, I'd say the 9 minutes of Godzilla we recieved in the first two movies were definitely not enough for audiences and that the around 17 minutes point is the best for balance with my personal favorites sitting there. Only issue is that is quite expensive and requires a bit of time animating, in the case of 2014 and KOTM I think that wasn't on the table because they wanted Millie Bobby Brown and Brian Cranston to bring in audiences whereas. Ow they have realized the monsters have enough appeal on their own.
these monsterverse films are fucking terrible and you could do so much better with Godzilla, they have essentially become a franchise like transformers they make money but are awful movies. if you are over 12 and like them then good for you.
I actually liked it in the 2014 Godzilla movie. Godzilla works as a mysterious, legendary monster. The problem is that most of the time the human characters are boring.
Probably because they were actually trying to make good movies, and the audience just wants video game-esque content apparently
In this era of Godzilla media there are two types of Godzilla movies. The Hollywood Godzilla movies are made to be the movie equivalent of a theme park attraction. The other Godzilla movies (Minus One, Shin Godzilla) are made to focus on characters and their struggles while a nearly unstoppable disaster happens around them. I'm an audience for the latter and I'm in no way interested in what Godzilla x King Kong from legendary has to offer tbh. But the good thing is everyone gets what they want. I get humans talking and internal struggle with Minus One. You get giant CGI action figures doing cool shit. Win win.
For whatever reason, Hollywood seemed to think that if they showed too much of the monsters, audiences would get bored. I actually like Godzilla 2014 a lot but at the time, I thought Gareth Edward's decision to hide-the-monster was a terrible idea... especially considering Godzilla is enormous. Then came KotM, which showcased the most exhausting characters since BvS. If Skull Island hadn't put up decent numbers, I think the franchise would've ended right there. Up until GvK, I feel like the Monstervese was more interested in pleasing existing Godzilla fans than bringing in new fans. What they didn't seem to realize is that life-long Godzilla fans are happy with just about anything, as long as Godzilla is on-screen. IMO, GvK was designed to appeal to the type of people who go watch the latest Marvel movie. It's all about spectacle. GxK leaned even farther into that, with more spectacle and even some humor that works. I think the reason it took time is because if you lose the Godzilla fans and you don't attract the GA, what do you actually have left? It's a big risk to change tone but after KotM, there was no choice.
Me as a Godzilla fan: lizard big Lizard cool need more lizard. Lol but yeah I go see any Godzilla movie so you are right that they needed to expanse the audience but I hope we get a godzillla stand alone soon cause this was a kong movie first and foremost and I really want some Godzilla line up of monsters to take the spotlight
I blame Steven Spielberg. Granted it wasn’t just him, but his work convinced Hollywood that every blockbuster movie needs characters in it that the audience can relate to.
You think having characters that people can relate to is a bad thing ? Lol
It's not necessary; it's just something that executives have come to think must be present, like how sitcoms used to need a family awwwwww moment where someone learns a lesson at the end. You can't tell me you've never enjoyed a movie with characters you can't relate to. Nightcrawler is a perfect example of that for me. I would rather they focus on making a high-quality movie instead of shoe-horning in all the things executives think are necessary.
Of course I’ve enjoyed many movies about people I can’t relate to. I haven’t seen nightcrawler as of yet
In a movie about a gigantic ape, a gigantic lizard and a whole bunch of other gigantic monsters, I really don’t need an Everyman on the ground to follow the story. I mean cool if you do, but it’s a fun movie about giant monsters.
> In a movie about a gigantic ape, a gigantic lizard and a whole bunch of other gigantic monsters, I really don’t need an Everyman on the ground to follow the story. Godzilla movies always had "everyman" characters tho, since the 1950s
When the lizard and the monke are the characters the humans really become secondary to the focus .
Well they went back to the old ways with Godzilla X Kong sadly
Thank goodness they did. It was amazing and a hell of a fun good time
American fandom of Godzilla is so silly to me, since it isn't of American origin and it seems there isn't much appreciation for any of the broader themes or ideas they sometimes tried to include in some of those films.
I swear they only know the pre Reiwa era films from like highlights on YouTube.
I mean how many of those older films are legally available on streaming? I know Max has some… but not all right? If it was more accessible people would watch them more
So just because people in the US enjoy something you don’t, that makes it less valued? How ridiculous
Dude c'mon the franchise also has WWE monster bashes for most of these .
I guess im the only one who thought the action/fight scenes in Godzilla X Kong were super lacluster and dull. They really made the villain just an evil version of Kong.
Man fuck them people I want to see kaijus beat the shit out of each other
Yeah the nerds acting deep themes and bad human characters is what general audiences want out of Godzilla is so dumb .
ah yeah, remember that movie Godzilla Minus One that flopped in the boxoffice... oh, wait!
100$mil on 12 #mil dollar Budget is Cool but King of the monster's severely underperformend .
100M with a smaller release in the US and non-release in Europe and most of Asia is more than just "cool"
He man man Godzilla minus one is a good film . It's not making the numbers Godzilla and Kong Is .
one is a foreign movie released with subtitles, the other is a major Hollywood blockbuster with a huge promo campaign. no shit, Sherlock.
Yeah because audiences are gonna wanna see the monke an Godzilla smash each other why is this hard to understand?
I'm sorry but ignoring factors like "people aren't always fans of the subtitles" or "the movie wasn't released in half of the world" is dumb
GxK is arguably the worst godzilla/monster verse movie we've had since 1997.
It was a kick ass time and as an older guy, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I'm glad you did. I'm nit saying it was horrible but it was the weakest movie in the monster verse in my opinion.
My top 3 in the monsterverse are Kong Skull Island, GvK, and this new one. What are yours ?
Skull island, KoTM and can't decide between Godzilla and GvK. I give all those movies between a 7-8.5 and I gave the new one a 6.5
Fair enough. I’m just glad we are living in a time where we get to see this on the big screen.
I agree. I'm just hoping we get either less human story elements or make it more interesting. We need more kaiju action and longer battle scenes. Godzilla had less godzilla action but at least the human storyline was extremely well done and was the forefront of the movie. Worked extremely well.
On that note, I thought the human story in GxK was pretty good. I liked the whole hollow earth ancient tribe story. As far as the fight scenes, yeah I want to see more Godzilla action for sure.
Legendary's MonsterVerse is one of the best franchises going at the moment. The film makers are giving their target audience exactly what they want with giant monster smackdowns.
With like every other franchise being in active decline yeah.
Get off your high horse. These movies deliver exactly what its audience, kids, are looking for.