Warner Bros. has dropped the first trailer for upcoming battle of the behemoths, Godzilla vs. Kong. This arrival is no surprise, as it’s just a week after the studio announced that they were moving the film’s release date up from May to March, where the film will hit cinemas in some areas, but also debut the same day on HBO Max.
It’s unclear if the date shift had anything to do with avoiding competition with Spiral and Free Guy – also scheduled for the prior May 21 release – was a gesture of goodwill after Legendary and Warner Bros. butted heads over their big-budget film being relegated to streaming, or something else entirely, but fans will simply be happy that they’re getting the film early.
The trailer is pretty much everything you’d expect to see in a clip teasing Godzilla and King Kong preparing to duke it out. Two classic monsters finally going head-to-head; most won’t care if the human characters are trying to hold the script together with exposition and bizarre reasoning. Just ring the bell!
Whether that actually leads to a great film is anyone’s guess, and one of the myriad reasons it’s disappointing that the film will mostly watched at home is that we won’t really get to gauge whether this cinematic monster-verse Legendary have put together is a success or not.
The plan began with 2014’s Godzilla, which was a hit, making $529 million worldwide. Kong: Skull Island then arrived two years later and made a similar amount – $566.7 million – and things were looking rosy. But 2019’s Godzilla: King Of The Monsters was a box office disappointment, barely breaking even when factoring in marketing costs, only making $386.6 million.
So Godzilla vs. Kong is designed to be The Avengers of Warner Bros./Legendary’s MCU parallel, but box office trends seemed to be up in the air as to whether this film would be the colossal hit they were hoping for. Now, because of the strange release, we’ll never really get a clear picture of whether the film would have had audiences flocking to cinemas or not.
Adam Wingard (The Guest) is directing the film from a script by Eric Pearson – who has also written another upcoming 2021 blockbuster, Black Widow – and Max Borenstein, who has penned every monsterverse film thus far.
Alexander Skarsgård, Millie Bobby Brown, Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Shun Oguri, Eiza González, Jessica Henwick, Julian Dennison, Kyle Chandler, and Demián Bichir star.
Godzilla vs. Kong arrives in cinemas and on HBO Max, Friday March 26.
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