With Kong: Skull Island opening this weekend to mostly solid reviews and a projected $100 million opening, it looks like the future is just about set for Legendary's upcoming monster mashup, Godzilla vs. Kong. With both iconic movie monsters having one solo film each, the time has come for Legendary to start getting down to business and actually figure out how to do this movie. To do that, they've put together a writers room just for Godzilla vs. Kong and have recruited a number of impressive and varied writers to iron out the story.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Terry Rossio will lead the Godzilla vs. King Kong writers room. Rossio is a veteran screenplay writer best known for his work on The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. He's also worked on the scripts for films like Shrek, Aladdin, Small Soldiers, and he's even got a story credit on that terrible Matthew Broderick Godzilla movie. The rest of Rossio's writing cohorts includes:
Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, who co-wrote Star Trek Beyond and who are working on Star Trek 4;Lindsey Beer, who is currently adapting The Kingkiller Chronicles for Lionsgate;Cat Vasko, currently penning Warner Bros.'s adaptation of period circus love story, Queen of the Air;T.S. Nowlin, the writer of the Maze Runner movies who already worked for Legendary on its Pacific Rim sequel;And J. Michael Straczynski, the comic book writer and creator of 1990s sci-fi showBabylon 5 whose recent credits include World War Z and co-creating Netflix show Sense8 with the Wachowskis.
Rossio and his writers will develop ideas and beats for the story, and once that's done, a writer will be assigned to pen the script. This writers room is a real mix of upcoming and veteran talents, each of them familiar with genre storytelling in one way or another. It's a pretty promising assembling of writers, though, it is a bit difficult to gauge some of them due to their biggest projects not having released yet. I certainly don't envy any of them, as ironing out the specifics of this behemoth and delivering a satisfying plot won't be an easy task.
Studios assembling writers rooms to develop stories in a shared cinematic universe is becoming common practice. Universal has one for their classic monster films which will have its first movie, The Mummy, opening later this year. Paramount also assembled their own writers room to develop Transformers films, which went on to birth Transformers: The Last Knight and a Bumblebee spin-off. What's notable about Legendary's writers room, though, is that they've brought together seven writers for just one film, as opposed to a whole shared universe. Not to say that they won't toss around ideas for Godzilla or Kong sequels, but it goes to so how much effort Legendary is putting into the film. Fingers crossed that they can nail down a great story.
While we'd all like to just skip right to Godzilla vs. King Kong, we've got to get through one more Godzilla sequel before the big face-off. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is set to release on March 22, 2019, followed by Godzilla vs. King Kong on May 29, 2020.
