One of the best scenes in Godzilla vs. Kong is arguably the most outright bizarre sequence in the MonsterVerse’s history, when a team of intrepid human explorers follow the giant ape into the Hollow Earth, having tricked Kong into believing that he might have some ancestors down there.
For the most part, the franchise has unfolded firmly on our side of the planet, but the journey into the Hollow Earth is a fantastical, psychedelic and often trippy detour into pure outlandish sci-fi territory. It allows director Adam Wingard to throw some eye-popping visuals onto the screen, and it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen before from a series that’s hardly remained faithful to the ideas of logic or realism.
As well as a Face/Off sequel, Wingard was recently announced to be co-writing and helming a ThunderCats movie, which he’s hoping will seamlessly blur the lines between live-action and animation. It’s been a passion project of his since childhood, and in a new interview, he admitted that creating the Hollow Earth in Godzilla vs. Kong gave him the creative push to realize that he could finally make his lifelong dream a reality.
“The ThunderCats thing is interesting, because I’d kind of written it off for so long. Because, like I said, as a kid, it just seemed like it was impossible. And so, it was only really actually during the pandemic, and I would say during the late phases of the Godzilla vs. Kong post, when I started getting shots in from the Hollow Earth scene. I started looking at it and, honestly, this is how it started. It was literally I was looking at shots of Hollow Earth and I thought, god, this is exactly what a ThunderCats movie should look like. And then I thought, wait a minute, I could make the ThunderCats movie!
When I was making some scenes of Hollow Earth, I looked at that, and I thought the technology’s there. And my experience, not just with the aesthetic of Hollow Earth, but also I felt like making King Kong such a well-rounded CGI character, that was so emotive and believable and filled with limitless possibilities for me as a director, that’s when I was like, ‘I can do a Thundercats movie, and it would actually work’.”
ThunderCats is superficially similar to Godzilla vs. Kong in that it’ll be a big budget fantasy blockbuster produced by Warner Bros. that comes with a built-in fanbase and will rely heavily on visual effects to bring its cast of main characters to life. Luckily, Wingard has already proven himself more than capable in that department, with his creature feature scoring the best critical notices in MonsterVerse history as it continues to take a sizeable bite out of the box office, so the project appears to be in very good hands.