The stakes are raised in ‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire’

CEBU, Philippines — See the combined forces of Kong and Godzilla like never before in the ultimate titan team-up, “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.” Kong’s journey to find his family leads to an undiscovered layer of Hollow Earth, and with it, the most dangerous threat to mankind yet.

Given the success of the previous film, the epic monster mash “Godzilla vs. Kong”, director, story writer and executive producer Adam Wingard decided to go another route for “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.”

“I remember even as we were completing the last movie, that was the thing in the back of my mind. ‘Where do you go from here?’,” he says. “The characters – now that they’ve fought together, they’ve been in movies together – it’s pretty hard to imagine doing another movie without them. Once you put Godzilla and Kong together you can’t take them apart, but they’re never gonna get along really all that well. They both have too big of egos, and so what’s fun about them is that even when they do team-up, there’s always gonna be this sort of uneasy truce to it all.”

As their relationship changes, audiences can look forward to Godzilla and Kong going through their own evolution as well. “In ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’, it was really important to me to make sure that there was continuity between the other movies – that Godzilla felt like the Godzilla that we had established in the Monsterverse, and Kong also felt like the same character. But for me, I was looking forward to having my opportunity to update the character, to give him a new look, and I didn’t want it to just be something that was just a random thing,” Wingard says, explaining his vision for the Titans’ updated look.

“I wanted it to be driven by the story, and so I knew even at the early development phases, that I wanted to give Godzilla a new look, but I wanted to make sure that it was also motivated by something going on in the movie and that we would actually see the evolution happen within the film.”

The reason for the legendary team-up between the two Titans? A mysterious, powerful new villain: Skar King. “When you have a movie called ‘Godzilla x Kong’, you can’t just have another run-of-the-mill kind of situation for them to be in. You have to come up with something that is going to require a team to take it down,” says Wingard about how Skar King is going to shake things up for the duo.

“Because of the humanity within Kong’s character, we were able to come up with a villain like the Skar King. It opened the door where we could tell that same ‘evil side of humanity’ story, but from the monster perspective, and that means creating an even bigger threat that the Skar King is in control of. In the way that humans have armies and weapons of mass destruction, the Skar King’s got his version of that, and it’s gonna take all the hero monsters in the world to band together to be able to stop him.”

Finally, Wingard talks about what people can expect in “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire”, being inspired by the monster movies of old. “[Because] ultimately, I wanted to make not just another Monsterverse film, but a thrill ride like you’ve never seen before. I wanted it to be a mic drop moment for monster movies. Whatever kind of movies I make in the future, as far as monsters go, I want this to say everything, and I want to be able to walk away knowing that we did everything…and the kitchen sink!”

The epic battle continues as Legendary Pictures’ cinematic Monsterverse follows up the explosive showdown of “Godzilla vs. Kong” with an all-new adventure that pits the almighty Kong and the fearsome Godzilla against a colossal undiscovered threat hidden within our world, challenging their very existence – and our own. “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” delves further into the histories of these Titans and their origins, as well as the mysteries of Skull Island and beyond, while uncovering the mythic battle that helped forge these extraordinary beings and tied them to humankind forever.

The film stars Rebecca Hall (“Godzilla vs. Kong,” The Night House”), Brian Tyree Henry (“Godzilla vs. Kong,” “Bullet Train”), Dan Stevens (“Gaslit,” “Legion,” “Beauty and the Beast”), Kaylee Hottle (“Godzilla vs. Kong”), Alex Ferns (“The Batman,” “Wrath of Man,” “Chernobyl”) and Fala Chen (“Irma Vep,” “Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”).

Get ready for the ultimate monster movie as “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” storms into Philippine cinemas on March 30. It is distributed here by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Discovery company.