The first episode of the new MonsterVerse TV show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters didn’t waste time delivering Titan-centric action to Apple TV+ subscribers. After recording a message for someone important to him, John Goodman’s Bill Randa, one of the key characters on the Monarch cast list, found himself caught in a fight between two of the title location’s gigantic monstrosities. But as is often the case with intricate sequences like this, it went through changes, Sean Konrad, Monarch’s VFX supervisor who enhanced Godzilla in a key way for the show, went over this evolution with CinemaBlend.
While Kong: Skull Island depicted Randa (whom Goodman had one “concern” with reprising in this series) being devoured by a Skullcrawler, Monarch revealed the character nearly met his demise sooner during the 1973 expedition when he found himself in the middle of a brawl between a Mother Long Legs and a new Titan known as a Mantleclaw. Konrad starred out this portion of his conversation with me ahead of Monarch’s premiere by recalling how it was difficult finding a location suitable for the action sequence that showrunner Chris Black and director Matt Shakman (who had an “incredible” experience directing Kurt and Wyatt Russell) had pieced together:
Chris had had scripted this whole idea, Matt Shakman had come in and come up with this… we sort of revised it a little bit, worked on a different version of a monster, all of these things. And as we were trying to find a location in Hawaii, we just couldn't find something that made sense for what was scripted. And so to make it work, we were gonna need to put a blue screen there, and then come back on three different days. It would have been a mess from a production point of view. So it was like, ‘Okay, well, what can we do?’ So Matt Shakman asked the locations team if they had wildcard ideas of things that they could do, places where a good chase sequence can be, and they showed us this place, Lanai Lookout, which is this volcanic rock peninsula that just goes to a tiny point. So that completely changed how we thought about the scene, and we took the whole thing and threw it out. The scene was fundamentally still a chase scene, but the action was more prolonged in a single location. It was a lot different.
Although Bill Randa came to Skull Island with a few Monarch coworkers, a military escort and some Landsat employees, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters shows a point where he got separated from the group and had to flee from the Mother Long Legs. This leads to the location on Skull Island that Lanai Lookout stands in for, and thinking he’s going to die right there, he tosses the bag he’d been carrying out into the ocean, as he doesn’t want it to be destroyed by that nightmare of an arachnid. While this sequence was always going to start out as chase scene, brainstorming led to not only the pursuing monster being changed, but also the inclusion of the Mantleclaw, with Konrad continuing:
And then ultimately, this was like a great opportunity to put a little monster fight in here. So we have random being chased by the Mother Long Legs of Kong: Skull Island, and then we have the Mantleclaw, which is this crab that fits into the volcanic terrain, but also has a loose evolutionary derivation from some other creatures in the MonsterVerse. So it allows us to tell a story through the design of the creature and fit into this landscape in a really satisfying way.
Bill Randa managed to avoid being stomped by the Mother Long Legs and the Mantleclaw, and the two Titans fell over the cliff, buying John Goodman’s character just a little more time. Check out the full fight below:
As for that bag of his, it was found by fishermen in 2013, a year before Godzilla’s battle with the MUTOs revealed the Titans’ existence to the public. Cut to 2015, when the “present day” narrative takes place, Anna Sawai’s Cate Randa and her newly-discovered half-brother, Ren Watabe’s Kentaro, found Bill’s bag and learned about their grandfather’s connection to Monarch, which at this point in the MonsterVerse timeline is still a relatively secret organization. While it doesn’t seem like we’ll be seeing more of John Goodman as Randa on Monarch, the show’s 1950s-set story features Anders Holm playing the character back when he was spending time with Wyatt Russell’s Lee Shaw and Mari Yamamoto’s Keiko.
New episodes on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters premiere Fridays on Apple TV+. If you’re interested in exploring other corners of the MonsterVerse, the first four movies can be streamed with a Max subscription, and Netflix subscribers can stream the animated Skull Island series. The franchise will also deliver Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire to the 2024 movies calendar on April 12.
