Legacy of Monsters Team Adapting MonsterVerse for TV – The Hollywood Reporter

Monarch: Legacy of MonstersThe team knows there’s high expectations behind their entry into the legendary monster franchise, home of Godzilla, King Kong, and more titans.

But during a conversation with… Hollywood Reporter After a New York Comic Con panel last month, showrunner Chris Black and executive producer Matt Fraction said they weren’t intentionally trying to match the scale or even focus of the legendary monster movies. Instead, Black — a TV veteran — and Fraction, a writer with a massive resume in the Marvel Comics universe, were more interested in how the medium could help support — not hinder — the kind of story he could tell within the MonsterVerse.

“In movies, the risk is always: Will the heroes die? In television there are 10 episodes. this “It’s our crew, and we don’t want to get rid of them in Episode 4,” Fraction says. “When you get to this, it’s not because you want to worry that the characters are going to die. You want to see what they’re like He lives“.

“We felt like we couldn’t make a successful show that was just a show about monsters. It was supposed to be a show about people who live in a world where monsters are real,” Black adds. “It was finding that delicate balance between spectacle and an intimate, human story. We knew as a practical matter that we had a generous budget to pull off a big show, but we couldn’t do what movies do.

“And you shouldn’t try,” Fraction concludes.

The Apple TV+ series, which debuted Friday and is released weekly, takes place between two timelines and across three generations. In 1959, three people in the Kazakh desert – young Li Shu (Wyatt Russell), young William Randa (Anders Holm), and Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), begin searching for the source of the disturbance.

In 2017, immediately after the events of Warner Bros. 2014 Godzilla In the reboot, a young woman named Kate (Anna Sawai) comes to Japan to settle the affairs of her famous father Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira), but stumbles upon an uncomfortable truth. He was living a double life, with a second family, which included Kentaro, Kate’s half-brother (Rin Watabe), and his mother (Kyoko Kudo).

Along with the older version of Shaw (portrayed by Kurt Russell), the mystery behind these monsters and the man who has been hunting them is what brings all of these people together across time in a series that the show’s creative team said they carefully worked with Legendary to not trample on. On their counterparts in the cinematic universe.

And you won’t ignore them either. Big screen movie fans will be happy to know monarch It literally begins with a sequence featuring Randa John Goodman, with the actor reprising his role Kong: Skull Island. But Black and Fraction are confident that theirs is a human story, grounded in a new look at movies that goes beyond the clashes that fans have come to love.

“To create a TV show from the ground up, you have to create something that people want to come back to over and over again. So I think what will bring them back week after week isn’t necessarily the big monster battles. It has to be a group of humans who want to follow that journey,” Black explains. With them”.

For Fraction, that gave the show a chance to create characters that, especially in a 2017 story, viewers could really see themselves in. The main characters are not Monarch agents, scientists, or special operations soldiers, but teachers and graphic designers. “These are the people we wanted to throw into this world,” Black points out.

“They don’t have the special formula. They don’t have the secret invention. They’re you and I having to take off our shoes and belts at the airport. They’re on the ground floor of this new world.” And because (the show) is about what comes next and how you make it worse the next time and more Seriously, part of the fun is that the longer it goes on, the gang begins to gain experience in this world. So every time they go higher, the risks increase. It builds towards just absolute cacophony.

The focus on character also opens the door for the series to explore its definition of the monster in a different and equally profound way. Creatures like Godzilla and King Kong have been around as long as other classic Hollywood monsters like the Wolfman, Frankenstein, and Dracula, as representations of the time in which their films were made. They talk about the cultural and societal concerns of a country; the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) geopolitical tensions between places in the West and the East; The power of the natural world versus the industrial world; And the legacy – including the damage – left by those clashes.

with Monarch: Legacy of MonstersBlack and Fraction confirms that for the first season, the larger monster will not be present Skull IslandGiant spiders or crabs, though, will certainly leave a mark or two on humans who encounter them.

“Kate’s traumatic event is when her father leaves — not when Godzilla attacks,” Fraction says.

“She was abandoned in her hour of need,” Black adds. She clearly lost her students in the attack. But it is the defining trauma in her life – her father – that will push her.”

“The movies are about cities that have been destroyed,” Fraction says. THR. “This is a show about people who are devastated. Kate is a wreck.

This focus on emotional arcs monarchThe set of The Titans allows the series to explore, on a human level, the same kind of questions fans have asked for decades about the Titans, whose destruction and defenses leave them oscillating back and forth between the title of hero and villain. “I think it’s in the third episode, where Shaw says this is your legacy and Kate says this is my curse,” Black says. “This is her journey – she has to choose. Is this a curse or a legacy? Is this something I reject or something I accept?

“It was fun to play that against Keitaro over the course of this season,” Fraction says. “Every new thing they learn, every new step they take, every new piece of the puzzle they find, reframes everything that came before. So, each one of them is forever feeling different and going on this journey that sometimes works together and sometimes doesn’t. It’s just fireworks.” All the time.”

This approach to the 2017 timeline also affected how the show handled flashbacks involving Show, Belle, and Keiko. Black reveals that the trio ultimately ended up with more scenes despite the fact that the 1950s timeline was “early in the development process, and it wasn’t intended to be as big a component as it is.”

“Then we found that there were a lot of stories to tell, and it was very interesting to follow those characters,” he continues. “We realized they needed not to be completely divided, but more of that story.”

“Without giving things away, the function of flashbacks is always to inform the present and its background. “But there are also times when you can put the audience in front of the characters in the present because you’ve seen their past,” Fraction adds. “So this was not only a way to fill out the world and the mythology; “It was a way to emphasize what was happening and make the present more significant and more relevant — to create a richer tapestry and a greater texture.”

These flashbacks also help expand the entire MonsterVerse timeline. “Everything I saw in movies was from the 1970s,” Black says. “Suddenly, there was a lot of room for us to play, even in four films.”

While the characters promise to be just as interesting – if not more so – than the monsters, the duo promise that even with a smaller budget, fans can still expect their series to deliver those legendary clashes. “We came into this with a deep, abiding love for the world of monsters, and we want to see those monsters as much as anyone else. “So it was important for us to not just skim the movie, not spoil it, but have the big guy come back.”

Fraction offers his own tease, and seems to be most excited about the new monsters their show will introduce. “We wanted to grow the world, typography and zoology in everything,” he says.

“To earn it as well. And when they show up, I feel like the story has earned it. And that something in our characters’ journey, as they search for their legacy, has put monsters in their path. So it’s not random,” Black adds.

In addition to these epic battles, monster encounters will impact the group’s journeys, from what they learn about Hiroshi to what they learn about themselves.

“We didn’t have a format where it was three episodes, so we needed to see a monster,” the showrunner explains. “The motivation behind that should be, how do they represent obstacles and opportunities for our characters? Then we got appearances by either one of our old creatures like Godzilla — the ones we love and grew up with — or new ones because we wanted to expand the universe.”

“They’re there in the character structure and the story structure,” Franken concludes. “We’re building it around family and these two brothers searching for their father.”

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 1 is streaming on Apple TV+.