Needs rewrite to line up with other era pages
The MonsterVerse is an American multimedia franchise and a shared cinematic universe between the Godzilla, King Kong, and other monster series owned and created by Toho Co., Ltd. The franchise is produced by Legendary Pictures and co-produced and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures that began in 2014.
The MonsterVerse takes place in an alternate Earth timeline inhabited by superspecies, giant monsters of various shapes, sizes, and forms; the largest of these life forms being the kaiju-like Titans that serve as the recurring protagonists of the series. Each of the films center around Monarch, a cryptozoological organization dedicated to studying the creatures, and their various encounters with the beasts.
Timeline[]
Pre-20th century[]
TBA
20th century[]
Monarch was first founded in the late 1940s to investigate the appearance of MUTOs (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism). In 1954, Monarch operatives Lee Shaw, Keiko Miura and Bill Randa bring evidence of Godzilla's active existence to General Puckett of the U.S. military, leading to the latter using an atomic bomb to lure Godzilla to Bikini Atoll, where they attempt to kill them using the Castle Bravo atomic bomb. Godzilla is presumed by the military and Monarch to be killed in the blast, although in actuality, Godzilla survives the blast with no lasting damage done.
In 1973, just after the Vietnam War, Monarch heads an expedition to the mysterious Skull Island, an uncharted landmass inhabited by many large creatures that have drastically evolved outside of mankind's influence. Among the creatures living there is Kong, a large humanoid ape. Most of the Monarch team perish during the expedition, and the remaining survivors assist Kong in warding off several attacks by Skullcrawlers, a species of reptilian super-predators and Kong's primary adversaries in maintaining the island's natural order.
In 1995, Aaron Brooks, the son of two survivors of the Skull Island expedition, leads a team of five on a secret mission to the island to see whether or not Kong is still alive and keeping control over the creatures there. Once the team is stranded, they encounter new MUTOs including the Death Jackals, Sirenjaw, and Swamp Locust. Led by members of the native Iwi tribe, the team learns about Kong's origins and how he became the last of his kind. After a year, Aaron meets Kong and ends up being the mission's sole survivor. He sends his recordings about the mission out to sea in a Monarch kevlar bag.
21st century[]
Aaron's kevlar bag is found in 2012 and obtained by his father who learns of his son's fate.
Godzilla resurfaces in 2014 after Monarch unwittingly awakens a pair of parasitic, insectoid MUTOs. He pursues the creatures to San Francisco, where he slays them while military forces obliterate a nest where the MUTOs had been breeding. The incident exposes the existence of giant monsters to the world, and Godzilla returns to the ocean. A few months later, Godzilla returns and defeats MUTO Prime before heading back out to sea. For the next few years, Monarch begins making more proactive attempts to seek out other MUTOs to prevent another catastrophe like the one in San Francisco from happening again. In their efforts, the organization discovers the Titans, a pack of monsters comprising of Godzilla, Kong, Mothra, Rodan, Ghidorah, Behemoth, Methuselah, Mokele-Mbembe, Scylla, Abaddon, Bunyip, Baphomet, Leviathan, Na Kika, Tiamat, Sekhmet, Yamata No Orochi, Typhon, Quetzalcoatl, Amhuluk, and Camazotz.
Five years after the battle in San Francisco, a cadre of eco-terrorists led by the anarchist Alan Jonah unleashes Mothra, Ghidorah, and Rodan with the ORCA, the bioacoustics invention of Dr. Emma Russell to control them and create worldwide terror. Ghidorah, who is considered a rival Alpha to Godzilla due to his immense strength and power, triggers the awakening of the other Titans around the world, threatening unfathomable levels of destruction and the possible extinction of mankind. To stop this, Emma's daughter Madison uses the ORCA to lure Ghidorah into a fight with Godzilla in Boston. With help from Mothra and Monarch, Godzilla destroys Ghidorah and subsequently becomes the Alpha to the other Titans. Two years later, as the world recovers from the apocalyptic catastrophe, Monarch once again returned to Skull Island, were they got attacked by Spirit Tiger, Death Jackal and Mother Longlegs.
Along the way, Kong also roamed around Skull Island, and discovering cave paintings behind some trees. Suddenly, Camazotz and his minions attacks Kong and Monarch out of no where, that until Kong defeats Camazotz with one final blow, sending Giant Bat back to the Hollow Earth, leaving Ghidorah's storm takes over the Skull Island. Three years later, since Ghidorah's storm destroys Skull Island, Godzilla suddenly begins to act aggressively towards humans, seemingly without provocation, and attacks numerous facilities developed by Apex Cybernetics.
Agents from Apex hire a Monarch sect led by operatives Nathan Lind and Ilene Andrews to seek out a radiation-based energy source in the Hollow Earth, an ecosystem located beneath the Earth's surface and the alleged birthplace of the Titans. With help from Andrews' adopted daughter Jia, who can communicate with Kong via sign language, they extract Kong from Skull Island to have him lead them there. Once they arrive in the Hollow Earth, Apex reveals its intention to use the power source in conjunction with DNA from one of Ghidorah's skulls to power Mechagodzilla, a powerful automaton designed to exterminate the Titans and ensure human dominance and the cause of Godzilla's sudden hostility. Mechagodzilla becomes self-aware and hostile as a result of Ghidorah's implemented DNA, killing its creators and going on a rampage through Hong Kong. Godzilla and Kong, after concluding their own feud with each other, work together to defeat the robot. After that, Godzilla returns to the sea while Kong returns to the Hollow Earth to make it his new home.
However, not long after the events at Hong Kong, Alan Jonah, who survived, has his team abduct Lahamu, a young Titan which happens to be Tiamat's progeny and uses a new ORCA-like device to lure Abaddon and Kong into an unspecified city with the intent of sampling their DNA for shady business, though they seemingly leave the town not long after being summoned there.
Three years later, Raymond Martin, a man who swore revenge on Titans after losing his family in the San Francisco incident, builds his own mecha and begins hunting Hollow Earth's fauna, capturing live speciments to test his robotic Titan and uses a decoy that awakens Scylla, sending the latter into a feeding spree as she attacks nuclear power plants across the world. While Godzilla soon gets busy tracking Scylla across the globe, Martin confronts Kong with his mech, only for the ape to defeat him and allow young cubs from a slain Spineprowler to end the hunter's life.
Shortly afterwards, while Kong begins developing a tooth infection after a hunting session and hopelessness after failing yet another attempt at finding another of his kind in Hollow Earth, Godzilla's pursuit of Scylla leads them both in Rome, where the former promptly dispatches the arachnid-like Titan and kills her before resting inside the Colosseum. After a crevice opens up, Monarch's Hollow Earth outpost is destroyed, prompting the organization to do an expedition in order to investigate after treating Kong's tooth infection, with the latter soon finding another unexplored layer of the Hollow Earth and a group of apes including a youngster that attacks him. Kong later demands the little ape guides him to where they came from, gradually bonding after a fight against a serpentine creature, with their journey leading them to a place where a population of apes still live, albeit in fear as their ruler enforces his power through tyranny, much to Kong's anger. On the surface, Godzilla awakens and begins raiding various sources of nuclear radiation to prepare himself after sensing mysterious distress signals, namely attacking a French town and heading north where he fights and kills Tiamat before taking her lair.
As Monarch investigates, they find an Iwi city which happens to have sent distress signals to Godzilla and discovers that the war between Godzilla and Kong's respective species was caused by Skar King's ambition to conquer the surface world. After fighting Skar King and getting his arm frost-bitten from a brief confrontation with a Titan his older opponent enslaved, Kong gets a gauntlet built from the remains of Mechagodzilla and heads back to the surface in hopes of getting Godzilla's help. Arriving in Egypt, the ape calls out to the newly-evolved Titan King who angrily rushes to his location, misinterpreting his call for help as a breach of their truce and nearly killing Kong until a revived Mothra intervenes and finally manages to convince the saurian to cooperate with Kong.
Together, they arrive just in time to halt Skar King and Shimo's progress, the ensuing fight allowing Kong to regain his axe until all four Titans fall through a portal that leads them to Rio de Janeiro. Not long after Skar King forces Shimo to cause a new Ice Age, Godzilla and Kong intervene once again, resulting in a somewhat evenly-matched fight until Suko emerges with Kong's axe and shatters the crystal shard, freeing Shimo from Skar King's control, allowing her to gain revenge on the humiliated tyrant who dies at the hands of Kong. In the wake of the battle, Godzilla undoes the climatic catastrophe the Ice Titan unwillingly caused and returns to Rome in order to rest while Kong returns with Shimo and Suko to Hollow Earth, granting the ape tribe its freedom.
Films[]
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TV series[]
Video games[]
Printed media[]
Novelizations[]
Comics and graphic novels[]
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Art books[]
Other media[]
Monsters introduced[]
Films[]
Godzilla[]
Kong: Skull Island[]
Godzilla: King of the Monsters[]
Godzilla vs. Kong[]
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire[]
TV series[]
Skull Island[]
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters[]
Video games[]
Godzilla x Kong: Titan Chasers[]
Kong: Survivor Instinct[]
Printed media[]
Kong: Skull Island - The Official Movie Novelization[]
Skull Island: The Birth of Kong[]
Godzilla: Aftershock[]
Godzilla: King of the Monsters - The Official Movie Novelization[]
Godzilla Dominion[]
Kingdom Kong[]
Kong and Me[]
Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure[]
Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted[]
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire - The Official Movie Novelization[]
MonsterVerse Declassified[]
Return to Skull Island[]
Scrapped and non-canon content[]
Godzilla[]
Godzilla: Awakening[]
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Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong[]
Godzilla vs. Kong[]
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire[]
Gallery[]
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Trivia[]
General[]
- The MonsterVerse is the first series of live-action Godzilla films since the Heisei era in which all of the films take place in a single related continuity.
- It is also the third series to encompass a single continuity, when counting the TriStar series and its spin-offs.
- This is the first Godzilla franchise to depict Godzilla and other giant creatures as naturally evolved super species adept to feed on radiation and are part of Earth's ecosystem and have existed since ancient times instead of beings that are results of mutation due to radiation exposure or other form of scientific misconducts and accidents.
- All of the films in the MonsterVerse are set to be distributed by Warner Bros. (except in Japan), despite Legendary's current distribution partner being Universal Pictures. This is because Toho's deal with Legendary to grant them the Godzilla license was made exclusively with it and Warner Bros.
- This is the first American-produced Godzilla continuity that features other trademarked Toho monsters other than Godzilla and King Kong themselves, with Mothra, King Ghidorah, and Rodan appearing in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. This is also the first time all four monsters have starred in a movie together since the Showa era film, Destroy All Monsters.
- Mechagodzilla's existence was hinted at in the credits of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and it makes its debut in Godzilla vs. Kong; thereby, this completes Toho's "Big Five" roster for the MonsterVerse.
- The "M"-shaped logo used for the MonsterVerse looks nearly identical to the Monarch logo.
- The first two Godzilla films interestingly share the theme of Godzilla rising to face opposing Titans that threaten the planet and assert his dominance with a fractured family being caught in the middle of the chaos trying to survive and reunite.
- This is the first in a long time that new monsters appeared on screen since the MUTO, the Skull Island flora/fauna, the Skullcrawlers, Behemoth, Scylla, Methuselah, and the Warbats.
- Some of the cast (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John C. Reilly, Corey Hawkins, Tom Hiddleston, Vera Farmiga, Anthony Ramos, Rebecca Hall, and Brian Tyree Henry) in each film have also appeared in the "Marvel Cinematic Universe".
- Kurt Russell starred in the new Monsterverse series.
- Godzilla and Godzilla: King of the Monsters are the only films in the series not to feature actors who had already appeared in the MCU.
- Akira Takarada who appeared in Godzilla films had a cameo in Godzilla (2014 film), that was cut from the film but the scene surfaced online ten years later. The Monsterverse ended up being the last series of Godzilla films that Akira appears in before his death in 2022.
- Lance Reddick and Dan Stevens had previously star together and worked with Adam Wingard in The Guest.
Godzilla[]
- The MonsterVerse is the first series in which Godzilla does not deliberately destroy in the first film. While Godzilla was portrayed as a protagonist monster in the first film of the Millennium series, Godzilla 1500: Millennium, he was still depicted causing destruction and attacking humans, while the Godzilla in Legendary Pictures' Godzilla is never seen intentionally causing destruction or threatening human characters, though he does cause some destruction as a byproduct of his size and battles.
Kong: Skull Island[]
- Kong: Skull Island is a first live action film where Kong is not killed in the climax at the film's end, and is the only live action King Kong who never leaves his island.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters[]
- In the audio commentary for King of the Monsters, Michael Dougherty reveals that he and Godzilla director Gareth Edwards are both fans of the 1975 film Jaws, which is why Edwards gave the protagonist family the surname "Brody" after the Brody family, and Dougherty named his film's MacGuffin device after Quint's boat. Ironically, the original Godzilla served as inspiration for Steven Spielberg for Jaws.
Godzilla vs. Kong[]
- The MonsterVerse is the first series to feature a battle between Godzilla and King Kong since the Showa era film, King Kong vs. Godzilla.
- Godzilla vs. Kong marks the first film where King Kong faces off against a member of Godzilla's rogues' gallery, in this case Mechagodzilla.
References[]
| Godzilla eras and series | |
|---|---|
| Continuity | |
| Japanese series | Showa era • Heisei era • Millennium series • Reiwa era • World of Godzilla |
| North American series | TriStar series • MonsterVerse |