In a new interview during the press cycle for his new horror film, Onslaught, writer-director Adam Wingard has revealed a bit more about his exit from Legendary’s MonsterVerse franchise and just how close audiences were to seeing him helm a third Godzilla vs. Kong movie.
Wingard got his start making low-budget horror-thrillers, delivering some all-timers within those unique constraints in the form of You’re Next and The Guest in 2013 and 2014, respectively. After the former of those films became an unexpected box office hit and both of them earned rave reviews, Wingard found himself moving up in the world and getting bigger budgets to play with. The first film he made within the proper studio system was he and co-writer Simon Barrett’s incredibly passionate and underrated sequel, Blair Witch. That film got little love upon release, but that didn’t slow things down, as Wingard moved on to his next big-budget adaptation: Netflix’s live-action Death Note. That film didn’t do particularly well either, but it did bring him to a blockbuster gig that perfectly fit his sensibilities: Godzilla vs. Kong.
The monster mash-up was far from a slam-dunk in the lead-up to its release, given that Godzilla: King of the Monsters had drastically underperformed at the box office and earned scathing reviews just a few years earlier. But Wingard persevered through the uncertainty of that and even the COVID pandemic, getting the film over the hump and to theaters in 2021. Godzilla vs. Kong proved to be a massive hit and one of the first films to successfully bring audiences back to the theater post-lockdowns. Wingard had basically righted the ship and made audiences ravenous for more MonsterVerse stuff, leading to Legendary putting a bunch of different projects into development, including a Wingard-helmed sequel, which became Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
The sequel was a similar blockbuster success, if slightly less acclaimed critically. Thus, the question became when audiences would get a third onscreen outing with the two titans, not if. But shortly after the release of New Empire, it was revealed that Wingard would not be returning to round out his trilogy. Instead, what became the upcoming Godzilla x Kong: Supernova was directed by franchise newcomer Grant Sputore.
Now Wingard is revealing why that change-up happened and how close audiences were to seeing him do his take on Supernova instead. As he details, at the time he and the studio “were talking about the follow-up. I was even laying Easter eggs in the last movie. If you look at Godzilla x Kong, a lot of like the titles of Bernie’s podcast, if you pause those, a lot of those were written by me because I was seeding sort of where I wanted to go with the sequel,” revealing that he and Legendary even went so far as to enter negotiations for him to sign onto the threequel.
Ultimately, though, Wingard asked them if they could wait for him to make one film in between, and the answer was no. As Wingard details, “This is a franchise that’s on the rails, and it ain’t coming off. They’re going to hit one of these every couple of years, as they should. So I had a sort of Sophie’s Choice moment where I needed to make a decision one way or another. Either I spend the next couple of years doing a Godzilla film, which I’d just done two, so I’ve been in that world for a while … or I could do the thing that I’ve been putting off for a decade, which is doing a smaller, more personal project. It was a difficult choice.”
Ultimately, Wingard’s personal film became Onslaught, which is a banger of a good time and among the best and most distinct works the filmmaker has ever made. As someone who loved his first Godzilla vs. Kong movie and was kind of less high on the sequel, I’m interested to see what the change of directors does for Supernova but also skeptical of it losing the surprising leanness and white-knuckle intensity that Wingard brought to the proceedings.
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