Though Wingard is known for R-rated horror films like You’re Next, The Guest, and Blair Witch, in a recent interview with a group of journalists, he calls Godzilla vs. Kong “the most Adam Wingard movie I [could] make.” Noting that even his horror movies have an “action movie kind of feel to them,” he adds he loves sequels such as 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.” “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 Godzilla: King of the Monsters and four decades after 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.”
