How Godzilla vs. Kong Beats Back Batman v Superman Comparisons
Director Adam Wingard on how he wanted his monster mash-up, Godzilla vs. Kong, to differ from Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
When Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Though Wingard is known for R-rated horror films like You’re Next, Terminator 2 and Aliens, which both upped the action quotient while feeling apiece with what came before.
It’s by the same logic that Wingard suggests 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla didn’t feel legitimate to him. Whereas the Godzilla in those films had already been established, and looks similar to his earlier films, “this was sort of a new King Kong.”
“This was the first Toho version,” he says. “He looks a little weird, if I have to be honest, and he’s not stop-motion either, you know? So he feels like a totally new character.”
As a result of the new interpretation of Kong, he says he never felt that movie was really King Kong versus Godzilla. He says he had the same problem with Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman, because it introduced Ben Affleck’s Batman into this new universe and dropped him right into a super-showdown.
“My issue with that movie is that it’s a new Batman,” Wingard says. “Up until then, Christian Bale was the definitive Batman, and so it felt like, okay, now that we’re doing Batman versus Superman, we’re also restarting Batman … So it doesn’t have that kind of like, ‘This is the ultimate match-up of these characters.’ There’s something off about it.”
He adds, “So going into this movie, I didn’t want that feeling.”
The new film is set pretty shortly after the events of Kong: Skull Island—and Kong has grown quite bigger in the interim—but Wingard says these look and feel like the monster characters we’ve already encountered.
He also notes that Legendary would have allowed him to change the look of Kong and Godzilla, but ultimately he didn’t want to change it up. If he had though, what would he have changed?
“I probably would have liked to make Godzilla’s head a little bit bigger; his head’s a little small, you know? That complaint is not lost on me.”
Written by
Aaron Sagers is a New York City-based journalist, author, and researcher of the weird, pursuing the cross-cultural connections of the paranormal across the globe for more…