The following contains HEAVY spoilers for Kong: Skull Island. Stop reading now if you haven't yet seen the movie!
You have to wait all the way until the very end of the credits of Kong: Skull Island to catch the tease for the franchise's upcoming movies. And yet, even those who did stay until the very end might not have understood what they were being show. Let's break down the footage, and what it all means.
Having survived the carnage that took place on Skull Island, famed tracker Conrad (Tom Hiddleston) and photojournalist Weaver (Brie Larson) are being detained in an interrogation room. They are speaking to the people who they KNOW are on the other side of a two-way mirror, demanding that they don't know anything else about what happened on the island. Suddenly, researchers Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) and San (Jing Tian) burst into the room They work for Monarch, a company that has been teased throughout Kong: Skull Island, and they explain that Kong isn't the only giant monster in our planet's history. They say that the world once belonged to these beasts, and they start showing slides to Conrad and Weaver. We see cave drawings. One is of Mothra. One is of Rodan. One is of King Ghidorah, the three-headed dragon. And of course, one is of Godzilla. When the scene cuts to black, we hear Godzilla's signature roar.
You see, Kong: Skull Island is part of a larger cinematic universe that is developing over at Legendary and Warner Bros. The "Monarch" references tie this new movie to Gareth Edwards' 2014 Godzilla movie. And it starts the ball rolling for two movies that have been announced, but have yet to go into production: Godzilla 2 (due on March 22, 2019); and King Kong vs. Godzilla (which we're secretly hoping carries the subtitle Dawn of Monsters, though Warner Bros. makes no promises).
With this revelation comes a number of questions. WHEN will these sequels take place? Gareth Edwards' Godzilla was a modern-day thriller, while Kong; Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts consciously set his story in the 1970s, meaning that we have a young Kong (who still towers over us at roughly 100 feet in height). Godzilla 2, we thought, would build off of Edwards' movie. But maybe it, too, will be set in the past -- somehow connecting the mega-monster face off that the studios have planned for 2020.
Much like Edwards, Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts said he tried to pull back on obvious Godzilla references so that his creature feature could stand on its own. But part of the reason for this movie is to establish the next steps in the growing franchise, and the end-credits sequence does exactly that. We actually know a good deal about Godzilla 2, including the director and some of its cast. Click below to find out what we know so far. And for Kong: Skull Island, it's in theaters as we speak.
Godzilla 2: What We Know So Far
