At the end of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire there is something going on with Kong, an immense, prehistoric gorilla who seems to get bigger with every film. After a battle with Shimo, an ice-blowing monster, his arm is frozen and therefore unusable – difficult, because the obligatory final fight against Shimo and super villain Skar King (another immense, prehistoric ape, with an extremely bad temper) is still to come.
“Plaster isn’t going to work here,” Rebecca Hall’s character notes, and mega-vet Trapper’s (Dan Stevens) solution is as simple as it is ridiculous: we give Kong a mechanical arm, one of the percussion hammer type – and especially one of the type that could have come from the brain of an over-enthusiastic teenager, probably one who spends too much time in his bedroom.
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire emphatically does not take itself seriously, and that works. Predecessor Godzilla vs. Kong (in which the two monsters do not fight with, but against each other) did not do that either, and despite the destructiveness of that film and its protagonists, that turned out to be the recipe to help the cinema get back on its feet after the Covid pandemic. brought worldwide Godzilla vs. Kong almost half a billion dollars, thanks to the film’s empty-headed escapism. “Godzilla vs. Kong is the kind of film that you almost completely forget just after you’ve seen it,” judged The Chicago Sun Times“but it’s also the kind of movie that makes you forget everything in your life while you’re watching.”
The budget of Godzilla x Kong is estimated at around 135 million dollars – slightly less than the more than 150 million dollars of Godzilla vs. Kong. Warner Bros. and Legendary, the studios behind the MonsterVerse that revived Godzilla and Kong about a decade ago, are apparently willing to open their pockets for the kind of entertainment you usually associate with B-movies. Only nowadays the B appears to stand for Big Budget.
Meme worthy
Anyway, B-movies aren’t what they used to be. From the 1930s to the 1950s, these were the second films of one double feature: often shorter and especially cheaper productions, with fewer major actors and especially less prestigious plots. Think: horror films, science fiction flicks and the kind of westerns that were more about violence than epic. In the common use of the term ‘B-movie’, only the latter remains: plots and premises that score few points in terms of prestige, but compensate for this with grotesque spectacle that works best on a big screen.
Part of the charm of B-movies is that grotesque spectacle doesn’t have to cost much, but it can yield a lot. This applies primarily to horror, a genre that remains inextricably linked to the label ‘B movie’ despite major box office successes. The end of 2022 was Smile an unexpected hit: shot for ‘only’ 17 million dollars, without big names on the bill, and good for no less than 217 million dollars at the box office. In the same category, in the same year: the horror film M3GAN, about a living and unsympathetic doll. Horror and humor go hand in hand, and a budget of $12 million multiplied into one box office of $181 million. The sequel, with the simple title M3GAN 2.0 – you don’t have to make things harder than they are – scheduled for 2025.
Both Smile as M3GAN could also rely on a simple but efficient – because viral – marketing campaign, which largely took place on platforms such as TikTok and Twitter. Also Cocaine Bear (2023) went viral before it even hit theaters: a marketing stunt thanks to director Elizabeth Banks’ social media reach (more than 3 million followers on platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Twitter) and the meme-worthiness of a film that Cocaine Bear is called. A bear that swallows a winter’s supply of cocaine and then attacks everything that moves: that needs little explanation, and it works well online. The B-movie has adapted to the 21st century.
There were predecessors, films that even left an impact mainly online: the films of Syfy, a cable TV channel that focuses on cheap monster films, the main selling point consists in its ridiculousness. Especially the Sharknadofilms appeal to the imagination: in them sharks are sucked into a tornado, before being spit out again above a major city of their choice. In the same category are the films of The Asylum, such as Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus (2009): a creature feature of which plot and title coincide completely. Scenes in which a mega shark leaps hundreds of meters out of the water to attack a plane continue to live on the world wide web.
Big, stupid fun
Syfy and The Asylum make TV films, but their appeal is not lost on studio bosses in Hollywood. And before you know it, the cinema is made unsafe by, for example, The Meg (2018), in which Jason Statham sinks his teeth (not literally, unfortunately) into a prehistoric mega-shark. But where Sharknado was shot for about 2 million dollars, if allowed The Meg about 130 million costs. A calculated gamble, as it turned out, because more than half a billion worth of tickets were sold at the box office. Meg 2: The Trench came out last year, and did almost as well.
B-movies on a blockbuster scale, so, just like Rampage (2018). It stars Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson as a paratrooper slash primatologist (that says a lot about the tone of the film), who, with the help of a gigantic mutated gorilla, takes on a gigantic mutated wolf and a gigantic mutated alligator. Rampage was based on a video game and used the simple tagline ‘Big meets bigger‘. “It sounds like a terrible premise for a movie,” the film magazine wrote Empire. “And it actually is, but it is also sort of a lot of fun.”
According to the specialized media, that joke cost between 120 and 140 million dollars and was directed by Brad Peyton, who had previously earned his stripes with the disaster film San Andreas (2015) and the adventure film Journey 2: The Mysterious Island (2012) – The Rock also played the leading role twice. Rampage did not do badly at the box office, with a gross of around 428 million dollars, even though the film was far from a ‘found food’ for the critics. Out of the review again Empire: “Rampage is big dumb fun, but not as big, dumb and fun as it could have been.”
The people behind the MonsterVerse seem to have been paying attention. Now there is gradually one superhero fatigue occurs and the Marvel superheroes maintain their monopoly on the top of the box office are slowly unloading, there are new franchises looking to claim their place at the top. Monsters may have a role to play in this, especially if they focus on the appeal of B-movies and ‘big, dumb, fun‘.
After all, the MonsterVerse films have also gradually moved in that direction, with Kong x Godzilla: The New Empire as a temporary highlight. Being in that sense Godzilla x Kong and Godzilla vs. Kong convincing B-movies, roughly speaking Godzilla (2014) and Kong: Skull Island (2017) that were much less. After all, the first two films of the MonsterVerse also wanted to have something to say: Godzilla changed from the Japanese original in that the monster served as a metaphor for the nuclear threat (the film opens with the collapse of a Japanese nuclear power plant), while Skull Island was set in the context of the Vietnam War and tried to make a point about colonization.
Moreover, in those first two films, the human characters also seemed more important than the monsters that populated the title: in the world of Godzilla, A-listers such as Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche walked around, on Skull Island there were Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson and Brie. Larson set foot. These are names of a greater caliber than Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry, who fully realize that their primary role is to fill in plot holes, a hint of comic relief and not to get too much in the way of a radioactive dinosaur and a pugnacious monkey. After all, they are the stars of the film, worth half a billion dollars box office – even if they don’t have a single line of text.
Because who needs text when you can beat a few monsters and metropolises to a pulp – preferably with a completely ripped-out mechanical arm? In the words of director Adam Wingard, before the release of Godzilla vs. Kong: “I just want to see Godzilla and King Kong fight each other in a neon-lit city, and that is 100 percent my main motivation.”
