Japan may have just given us the best Godzilla movie ever with Godzilla Minus One, but the massive kaiju will be back on the screen before too long with 2024’s upcoming movie release Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire. As a big fan of the current Monsterverse, I’m certainly looking forward to the new entry, but now even more so following some new details on the film’s villain, the Skar King.
Director Adam Wingard recently spoke with our sister site Total Film (via GamesRadar) and revealed a bit of new info about the creature that Godzilla and Kong will fight against in the new film. The Godzilla X Kong trailer has given us brief glimpses of the creature, known as the Skar King, which is a massive kaiju but is also, according to the director, not unlike the threat humanity poses to Kong. He explained…
What’s interesting about this new film is that we go in a direction that I don’t think this series has ever seen before, which is that the Skar King is, in a way, the closest that the human threat has ever been juxtaposed onto a titan itself.
The Skar King is a primate creature from somewhere inside the hollow earth, like Kong himself, but clearly, he’s also something very different. It’s not entirely clear what his beef is with the human world, but the movie is setting the monster up as something that Kong simply can’t beat alone, which requires him to team up with Godzilla to get the job done. Wingard says that the Skar King is in many ways the opposite of Kong, which makes him the “greatest threat” these films have seen. He continued…
The Skar King almost represents an upscaled version of the worst parts of humanity, just as Kong represents some of the best parts of humanity. I would say the Skar King is the greatest threat that we’ve seen in these movies. It’s really going to take a full team together to bring it down because it’s too big for just one titan!
Needless to say, for anybody who has enjoyed the monster-smashing action of the MonsterVerse films, this sounds like it will be a lot of fun. Having said that, the bar has certainly been raised when it comes to big kaiju movies after Godzilla Minus One. Considering that the Skar King is designed to be a reflection of humanity, it will be interesting to see how the story of the humans in the Godzilla X Kong cast integrates with the monstrous one, something that Minus One did masterfully. But either way, we should get some great monster-fighting action. The Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire release date is set for April 12, 2024.