Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire includes a metric ton of outlandish monster-on-monster action, which is obviously the main draw. But it’s also a movie that’s dense with story and lore about Kong and his people, and the seemingly timeless humans who used to live on Skull Island. And, on top of that, it sets up a new status quo in Warner Bros’ MonsterVerse that opens up some interesting possibilities for a franchise endgame, should they decide to go that direction from here.
Let’s talk about it.
Warning: This remainder of this article will consist of spoilers for the plot of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, including its ending.
There are three core plotlines in Godzilla x Kong: Kong and his fight against the Skar King in the Hollow Earth; the people from Monarch (Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Kaylee Hottle returning from the last movie, and new addition Dan Stevens) who are also exploring Hollow Earth and trying to figure out what Kong has gotten himself into; and Godzilla back on the surface, leveling up his powers in anticipation of the Skar King’s arrival.
Kong’s thread is the primary one that drives all the film’s action. He’s still exploring Hollow Earth in search of his people, and new pathways keep opening up–and one of these new holes allows him to finally find some other giant apes. But these are hostile, and they attack Kong, but he defeats them and escapes, with the unwitting assistance of a giant kid ape named Suka who ends up serving as his sidekick–a son of Kong, if you will.
With Suka as his guide, Kong finds the ape base and discovers the main villain, the Skar King, has enslaved a bunch of other apes for some nefarious purpose. Kong attacks, and the Skar King unleashes his biggest weapon: another Godzilla-like titan named Shimo, this one crawling on four legs and firing a beam of ice from its mouth. Kong escapes, barely, but more evil apes are in pursuit. Kong is very much overmatched.
Our human characters, meanwhile, are investigating some kind of signal that’s coming from beneath the Earth–one that young Jia, who is deaf, can’t stop seeing in her head. And so Ilene (Rebecca Hall) sets off into Hollow Earth with Trapper (Dan Stevens), Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry) and a Monarch military guy destined to be killed off quickly, to try to find out what’s going on.
It takes some time for them to learn anything, because the Monarch outpost they try to visit has been destroyed, but eventually they encounter more humans–members of the Iwi tribe from Skull Island. Jia was thought to be the last of them, but it turns out they had relocated underground in order to more closely monitor the Skar King, who had been imprisoned in a part of Hollow Earth that was completely closed off. The evil ape has made a lot of progress toward escaping, and the signal that Jia had felt was the Iwi’s distress signal, essentially.
It also turns out Jia, as the only surface-dwelling Iwi remaining, is the only one able to fulfill an important prophecy related to this situation, in which an Iwi from Skull Island would summon Mothra at an ancient temple. And Jia does just that.
That’s going to end up being a crucial contribution to the coming fight against the Skar King, but it’s not the only way the humans are able to help. Kong, after repeated fights against the bad apes, is pretty beat up and one of his arms is basically useless at this point. But Trapper has an idea–the folks at that previously mentioned destroyed outpost had in storage a mechanized arm brace for Kong that had never been used. They manage to fit it on the big guy (we’re not going to worry about how), and now he’s stronger than ever.
But he still needs more help. He needs Godzilla, who had killed another irradiated kaiju and absorbed its power, and is now even more powerful than before. So Kong heads to the surface to try to recruit him. It goes poorly at first. The two encounter each other near some of the Pyramids in Egypt, and proceed to completely wreck the ancient landmarks by fighting too close to them. Kong tries to stop the fight, but Godzilla ain’t hearing it. But that changes when Mothra shows up–when Mothra speaks, Godzilla listens. Mothra is able to get Godzilla on board, and they all head back down to Hollow Earth to face the Skar King.
A spectacular major battle ensues, but it’s just the prelude to the real thing. The Skar King escapes to the surface with Shimo during the fight, and this titanic battle continues in Rio de Janeiro. From here we get what we expect from this franchise: these giant beasts beating the crap out of each other and devastating an iconic world city in the process, with Shimo’s ice beam freezing the city’s famous beaches. (This is the second time a movie has frozen those beaches in the past decade, after Gerard Butler”s Geostorm.) It’s anybody’s game for a while, but the breaking point comes when the chain that the Skar King uses to control Shimo is broken. And Shimo responds appropriately, by sending an ice blast the Skar King’s way–the balance of the fight completely upended, Kong is able to use the Skar King’s new vulnerability to put him down.
And this leaves us with the titular new empire, and a new status quo with Kong, Godzilla, Mothra in some kind of alliance, and the humans of Earth left to continue to hope they don’t get stepped on.
Does Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire have a post-credits scene?
No, Godzilla x Kong doesn’t have any bonus scenes after the credits that might tease the direction that Warner Bros. plans on taking this franchise. It’s likely that the studio is in wait-and-see mode with this one, without much urgency to get the next one started–while these movies have been successful, they haven’t done well enough to warrant a sequel greenlight before the numbers have been crunched.
So for now, the situation after Godzilla x Kong is basically the same as it was after Godzilla (2014), King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong, with titans running around everywhere and the humans unable to do much about it. That obviously leaves open the possibility for more, should Warner Bros. choose to make another movie or another season of the Monarch series on Apple TV. But this ending is open-ended, allowing for the possibility of doing more in this universe without broadcasting any specific intent. So we’ll have to wait and see.
