'Godzilla Vs King Kong' Exists Because The Head Of Legendary Pictures Wanted To See Them Fight

Legendary Pictures has big plans for their "gigantic monsters with recognizable names throwing each other into buildings" slate. Kong: Skull Island had a trailer at Comic-Con before it even had a director (Jordan Vogt-Roberts is currently shooting the film). A sequel to 2014's Godzilla was announced right as the first movie hit theaters, and we later learned that it will feature a plethora of beasties for the King of the Monsters fight.

And then, a few months ago, Legendary shook everything up by moving Kong: Skull Island from Universal to Warner Bros. as part of a grand plan to build a shared universe that will allow all of these iconic monsters to interact. And by interact, we mean punch each other in the face. Naturally, that meant the announcement of Godzilla vs King Kong movie... and it turns out that Legendary Pictures CEO Thomas Tull had slightly selfish reasons for all of these machinations.

While speaking at Business Insider's Ignition conference yesterday, Tull admitted (via Variety) that he had ulterior motives when he set out to make a Godzilla vs King Kong crossover movie:

I'm juvenile. I wanted to see them fight.

Can you blame him? Tull just did what any of you would have done if you had control over two of the most famous gigantic monsters in movie history. Tull's toy box overfloweth, so why the hell not? Ken Watanabe still says it best:

And while that Variety article goes into additional detail about Tull's future plans for Legendary Pictures (five or six films a year, some experimentation with virtual reality, etc), it fails to answer the the biggest question we have about Godzilla vs King Kong. How does a 50-foot ape battle a 300-foot dinosaur? That's the literal billion dollar question. Since Kong: Skull Island is set in the '70s, it's entirely possible to imagine monsieur Kong continuing to grow over the decades, reaching enormous heights by 2020, when the film will hit theaters. It's also possible that his size will remain consistent and he'll be forced to engage his foe through intelligent, guerrilla (ha, gorilla) tactics.

The 1962 film King Kong vs Godzilla simply made Kong as big as Godzilla and never questioned anything. However, that film also features a sequence where the Japanese military gets Kong drunk on spiked juice so they can airlift him to Godzilla's location for the final brawl, so maybe it's not the best thing to emulate for the new version. Spoiler alert: Kong wins.

Kong: Skull Island is currently filming and will open on March 10, 2017. Godzilla 2 will go before cameras when director Gareth Edwards is finished with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and will open on June 8, 2018.