Tremble before this first look at the Titans from “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”
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The MonsterVerse show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (premiering Nov. 17 on Apple TV+) is primarily set between the events of 2014's Godzilla, when the world first became aware of the giant Titans, and 2019's Godzilla: King of the Monsters, by which point the secret, monster-monitoring organization Monarch had become much less secretive. As executive producer Matt Fraction points out, "The world of Godzilla: King of the Monsters is so profoundly different from the world of Godzilla 2014. Monarch goes from being the Men in Black to the helpers everyone looks for when that siren goes off. It's a cool place to tell a story."
The show stars Anna Sawai as Cate Randa — a survivor of Godzilla's attack on San Francisco featured in the 2014 film — and Ren Watabe as her half-brother Kentaro. The pair set out to learn more about their late father, a quest which sets them on a collision course with Monarch.
"It's the journey of two siblings to uncover the secrets their father kept and why he kept them," says Fraction's fellow executive producer Chris Black. "What we set out to do was to make a show set in the MonsterVerse that wasn't focused on the monsters. We felt we couldn't compete with the feature films and we shouldn't try. To build a television series, you have to create a cast of characters, a set of people that you want to follow week to week, and, if we're lucky, multiple seasons. This is a show about people who have woken up and live in a world where monsters are real."
The show's cast also includes Kurt Russell as Lee Shaw, a veteran who has a long history with Monarch, and the actor's real-life son Wyatt Russell as a younger version of the same character, who we see in sequences set during the '50s.
But, hey, don't worry, creature connoisseurs: Monarch: Legacy of Monsters does feature Titans, both old and new. Check out exclusive images of the four fearsome beasts to be found in the premiere, below.
Mother Longlegs
Apple TV+/Legendary Entertainment 'Monarch: Legacy of Monsters'
The premiere opens with a previously undepicted episode from the at times harrowing adventure detailed in the '70s-set 2017 film Kong: Skull Island. John Goodman reprises the role of Bill Randa who in this initial sequence is menaced by a giant spider similar to the one featured in arguably the most terrifying sequence from the movie.
"One of the gifts of the show being set in the Legendary MonsterVerse world is we got to take the entire timeline as a playground," says Fraction. "Since this is about the Randa family legacy, and John Goodman's character from Kong: Skull Island [is] one of the founders of Monarch, we had this opportunity to go back to get John in the Bill Randa gear, and to put him in the jungle, and to revisit Skull Island. It was about getting Bill Randa back in the jungle, and on the run from this crazy piece of wildlife, and kicking things off with something new and terrifying while revisiting this canonical piece of story."
Mantleclaw
Apple TV+/Legendary Entertainment 'Monarch: Legacy of Monsters'
Speaking of new, the premiere's opening sequence also features a never-before-seen Titan named Mantleclaw, a giant crab camouflaged as a stretch of rocky terrain, who comes out of hiding to battle Mother Longlegs. Black explains that the decision to add a massive crustacean to the ranks of the franchise's monsters was inspired by "the production realities of shooting the episode. When Matt Shakman, who directed the premiere, went on the location scout in Hawaii, and was looking for places to shoot, the place they found was this really dramatic lava rock coastline. What crawls and scuttles around those lava rocks are crabs. The spider, or a version of it, had been established in the film. What was that fight going to be against? A giant Titan version of a crab seemed like a really easy solution."
Godzilla
Apple TV+/Legendary Entertainment 'Monarch: Legacy of Monsters'
The G-man appears during a flashback sequence in which Sawai's teacher Cate attempts to shepherd students off a school bus during the Titan's catastrophic attack on San Francisco previously shown in Gareth Edwards' 2014 film Godzilla.
"You see that bus, I believe, in Gareth Edwards' film," says Fraction. "We were like, what if that's Cate's bus?"
"It is the attack in San Francisco in 2014, but what changes is the perspective," says Black. "This was important to us in terms of the storytelling. The movies have an internal perspective, you're inside Monarch, with the teams, with the scientists, with the people that basically have all the answers, and a lot of times the camera will have that God's eye view of the monsters and the monster battles. We wanted to completely flip that perspective. These are ordinary people, on the ground, caught in the middle of it, who aren't privy to all this tactical information coming out of the Monarch war room. It's the same Godzilla, but you're not looking down on him from above you're looking up at him from below."
Endoswarmer
Apple TV+/Legendary Entertainment 'Monarch: Legacy of Monsters'
The show ends with a '50s-set sequence which takes place beneath an abandoned nuclear power station. In the scene, Wyatt Russell's Lee Shaw, Mari Yamamoto's scientist Keiko, and Anders Holm's younger version of Goodman's character discover a large quantity of mysterious eggs whose contents turn out to be a swarm of outsized, and dangerous, insect-like creatures — another new addition to the MonsterVerse's lineup of Titans.
"It was fun to remind the audience that not all Titans are 400-feet tall," says Fraction. "There's danger everywhere of all kinds of scale and size and — HEY, BOO! — stay on your toes!"
Nothing good ever comes out of an egg in one of these movies," adds Black.
"It's never eggs for an omelette. It's always bad news," agrees Fraction. "We've just got to get the word out to people: don't mess with eggs. Especially, if you find eggs in a nuclear reactor site, don't mess with those eggs!"
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters premieres with two episodes on Apple TV+ on Nov. 17.
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