Many people like to watch monsters fight. This primitive confrontation will show a larger scale and be more brutal than human fighting in the ring, but it can bring sensory stimulation. And watching the behemoth fight on the big screen is even more cool. As a special category, monster movies have many audiences all over the world, and the release in Godzilla vs Kong is the top event of "monster world". So what is the origin between these two monsters?
King Kong and Godzilla are undoubtedly the top monster images in the history of global movies, and they both left their names as non-human beings on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
King Kong is the original monster of Hollywood. In 1933, out of his love for gorillas, director Merian C. Cooper conceived the image of a giant gorilla monster, and as a director, he made the original "King Kong" film with the investment of the famous filmmaker Lei Dianhua at that time. In the movie setting, there is an unexplored primitive island in the Indian Ocean where huge creatures live, and King Kong is a huge orangutan on the island. It is the last one of this species. Because of its power, it is also called "King Kong" by the natives on the island, that is, the king of orangutans. In the original, King Kong had torn the dinosaur by hand, and the scene of being transported to new york and climbing the Empire State Building to jerk off has become a famous scene in the history of movies. The monster scenes in the original "King Kong" movies were made by special effects artist Wills O'Brien through grid-by-grid animation, which is also considered as a milestone in the development of grid-by-grid animation. And director Merian C. Cooper even creatively invited his friend Deloose Lavles to fictionalize his works and publish them before the release of the original films. With the popularity of movies and novels, King Kong has also become a well-known IP, and later a series of offline peripheral products and theme parks have been derived.
The image of King Kong is so classic that many works of art all over the world have directly or indirectly borrowed the image of the giant gorilla. "King Kong" also experienced several remakes later, including the 1976 version directed by john guillermin, but I believe many people are more impressed by the Peter Jackson version in 25 and Kong: Skull Island in 217. The former is basically the same as the original story, while the latter paved the way for joining the subsequent "monster universe".
Godzilla, from Japan, made his debut in the monster film of the same name produced and released by Japan's Dongbao Co., Ltd., directed by Honda Tadatoki, and Eiji Tsuburaya was in charge of special technology, who was also the world-famous creator of the series "Altman". Later, they also cooperated in the third Altman work "Returning Altman". Eiji Tsuburaya once said that "King Kong" is an important reason for him to take a special photo. "Special shooting" refers to shooting with special technology, which was an important means to make special effects in the era before computer CG animation. However, unlike King Kong, which used clay and other models to shoot frame-by-frame animation, Japanese filmmakers pioneered the method of adding leather covers to miniature models, and Godzilla was the first monster film shot by this technology.
The early Godzilla was set as a rare behemoth between Jurassic and Cretaceous, which was in the middle form between marine reptiles and terrestrial mammals. Godzilla in the film was a surviving individual who landed in Tokyo and destroyed the city because of the hydrogen bomb experiment, and was later killed by the weapon "oxygen destroyer" invented by human beings. The first film Godzilla was released in 1954, less than 1 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed by atomic bombs. After the war, the Japanese people's gloom about nuclear power has not dissipated, and although the main image in the film is a fictional monster, it is full of anti-war meaning and thinking about nuclear energy and environmental protection. Since then, Godzilla has appeared in 36 films, and has also released a series of animation and game works, and even made guest appearances in comic works by Marvel Comics and DC. NASA once named the new constellation with Godzilla.
Godzilla vs Kong is not the first time that two behemoths met. On the one hand, it is the ancestor of monsters in Hollywood, and on the other hand, it is the king of monsters in the future. Although the two behemoths are separated by the Pacific Ocean, they have also been linked after they became famous. No matter which generation, people like the topic of "Guan Gong vs Qin Qiong", and just as there are always many people on the Internet who discuss which is better, the idea of letting King Kong fight Godzilla is not a new idea in the 21st century.
in 1962, on the 3th anniversary of the company's founding, Dongbao Co., Ltd. borrowed the image of King Kong from Universal Pictures, which contributed to the first time that the history of the two monsters was framed together. Coincidentally, this "King Kong vs Godzilla" happens to be the third big-screen works of King Kong and Godzilla respectively. As this film belongs to the Godzilla series, King Kong also performed in a holster, which is quite different from the original films. I don't need to go into details about the story of this film, but it is also roughly that the death of human beings led to the encounter between two behemoths. At this time, the wrestling movement in Japan is booming. The film changed its original serious style tone, and added many anthropomorphic fighting and wrestling moves to the main fighting scene of two monsters, and arranged some funny scenes at the same time. When the film was released, it coincided with the peak of the Japanese film market. The number of people watching it exceeded 12.55 million, which created a very high box office, and the content form basically laid the style of confrontation between big monsters in Japanese monster movies.
Godzilla also traveled across the ocean to America in the last century. In 1998, Samsung Film Company cooperated with Sony Pictures to release an American version of Godzilla directed by roland emmerich. The behemoth of this work is set as a big lizard which is affected by nuclear radiation and mutates. It lands in new york to wreak havoc and is finally knocked down by human beings. This time, the model and setting of Godzilla, a classic monster, was greatly magic change. Godzilla in the film can lay eggs, so it was strongly criticized by a series of fans and film critics, which led to Dongbao depriving it of its Godzilla identity and changing its name to Godzilla. Subsequent films released by Dongbao, Godzilla Mosla King Ghidorah's Monster Attacks and Godzilla's Last Battle, all made official comments on this monster. Both King Kong and Godzilla have already become the world's top monster IP and pop culture symbols.
After Marvel Comics launched the "Marvel Comics Film House" with superhero assembly and linkage, which achieved a double harvest at the box office, Hollywood set off a "movie universe" wind, and major film manufacturers followed suit, trying to launch their own IP-linked universe, including Warner's "DC Expanding the Universe" and the "Dark Universe" around the world (a world view with many well-known ghost images, including mummies, Dracula, werewolves, etc.), but it seems to have died at present. The legendary film company also hopes to build a "monster universe", so together with Warner, it joined forces with Dongbao and Universal to start action.
The copyright of Godzilla has always been firmly in Dongbao's hands, and it has developed smoothly in Japan, but the King Kong side is in chaos. King Kong was created by Merian C. Cooper, but Lei Dianhua licensed the image of King Kong to Dongbao without his consent and sold the copyright of King Kong North America to Universal Pictures, so Cooper took the three parties to court, but the result was that Cooper only got the copyright of the novel and publication of King Kong. In 1975, Italian producers bought the adaptation rights of the 1933 version of King Kong from Lei Dianhua for remake of the film, but at this time, the relevant copyright was transferred to Universal Pictures, which triggered another dispute, and Cooper's son also joined the competition again this time. The process is very complicated, and the final result is:
In addition, Nintendo's game "donkey kong" caused a copyright dispute with Universal in 1982, and Universal lost the case because it didn't have exclusive trademark rights of King Kong.
A few weeks after the film was released, Legendary Pictures announced at the San Diego International Comic-Con that he had obtained the copyrights of three classic monsters, namely, Mosla, Raton and King Ghidorah, from Dongbao, and the legend in 215 revealed that King Kong was also expected to join. So the monster universe was officially unveiled, and the most classic monsters in eastern and western movies will gather together.
In the recently released Godzilla vs Kong, the two top monsters finally meet again in the new century. Before the release, director Adam Wingard had previously revealed that the two monsters would have a clear winner this time. Compared with "Kong: Skull Island", King Kong in this film has grown further and become bigger, which can rival Godzilla. It may be that the film side realized that fans hoped that there would not be too many human scenes in the monster film. Compared with the previous works of the monster universe, this film focused more on the monster itself, almost from the beginning to the end, and several major dramas took place in bright scenes, and the details were unobstructed. In this film, King Kong and Godzilla fought three battles, and they all won, but each battle was different and the result seemed reasonable. In the last two monsters in the film, they joined hands against Godzilla, the classic artificial monster machine, and staged an exciting cooperative battle.
If you go to see a movie with the sensory stimulation of a monster fighting, with the cooperation of top-level special effects, the experience of this film will definitely satisfy the fans. At present, the film has also won more than 5 million box office in China, becoming the highest box office imported film since 22, and the world has also created the best box office results of Hollywood films after the epidemic.
Some people may wonder, Godzilla vs Kong is the top ace group that can even rival Superman V Batman. Why should they be allowed to win at the first meeting in the monster universe? In fact, the reason is very simple. Godzilla vs Kong is the stage ending of the monster universe, and Godzilla is about to leave. Japan's Dongbao, the copyright owner of Godzilla, said that the cooperation agreement with Legend will end in 221, and the copyright of Godzilla will be recovered, and in the future, it will build its own "Dongbao Monster Universe". This may also be why Godzilla 2: The King of Monsters released several monsters authorized by Dongbao at one time.
After the success of the Hollywood version of Godzilla in 214, Dongbao also invited Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi to release the film True Godzilla. Then Dongbao continued to cooperate with the two men, and together with Yuangu Co., Ltd., it will launch the remake film "New Altman" of "Altman" series in 221. Dongbao seems to be launching a remake of classic special photos at its own pace. Perhaps these classic special images may also appear on the same screen under Dongbao in the future.
In addition, there have been rumors on the Internet that the legend may link the Pacific Rim series with the monster universe. In 213, guillermo del toro, the director of the first film "Pacific Rim", said that "it would be great to see the giant mecha fighting Godzilla", and Steven S. DeKnight, the director of "Pacific Rim 2", also expressed the hope that the series could join the monster universe. With the continuous expansion of the world view of the monster universe itself, all this is not impossible.