The so-called “MonsterVerse” series of films from Legendary and Warner Bros. Pictures—Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla: King Of The Monsters, and Godzilla Vs. Kong—have already proven that it is possible for someone other than Marvel to put together a relatively successful cinematic universe. Others have done it as well (hell, Toho’s original Godzilla movies should count), but now the MonsterVerse is trying to do something that has been much harder to pull off: expanding that universe to television.
Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters on Apple TV+ ties in with the MonsterVerse movies, and the show is both indebted to the canon of the films and wisely separated from it. That’s a smart approach, and it helps Monarch avoid the usual pitfalls found in these situations. For one thing, it doesn’t need to invent exciting new things for the characters to be doing when they’re not doing exciting things in the movies. And it can still operate in a world where those things happened and you can see the repercussions of them. Monarch walks that line nicely, never feeling like an irrelevant part of the larger story or a distractingly crucial beat that nobody in the movies will ever acknowledge.
Pretty much every big shot in Hollywood has probably dreamed of shepherding something like this, a complicated interconnected universe that encourages everyone to keep up with both movies and television, but it’s clearly difficult to maintain. You could count the winners on one hand: Evil Dead managed it, though that technically was just a continuation of the movies; The Purge did it (a surprise, considering that the movies are explicitly about the small window when things happen); and the Sonic The Hedgehog movies are going to try it with a show about Knuckles. But the two most prominent examples—and the only two in recent memory to take a serious swing at the concept—are Star Wars and Marvel.
Monarch’s secret weapon: No homework required
Those two Disney franchises are certainly big enough to justify using TV shows to explore previously unseen corners, but they’ve both struggled with consistently supporting TV. The problem is usually about stakes, since a threat big enough to warrant the attention of one superhero in their own solo Marvel show could probably warrant the attention of a few Avengers (who will never show up). In Star Wars, meanwhile, a threat can only ever be so large before it becomes silly that nobody in the movies can ever mention it.
The most successful of these shows have found their proper balance, but Disney’s impulse usually seems to be trying to make a TV show that feels as big as the movies it ties in with. None of the Star Wars shows tangibly impacted the movies, which became more jarring when Ahsoka had to hype up both a hero and a villain who completely sat out of the Star Wars movies, while Marvel has yet to connect any of its shows to films in a way that feels necessary. Viewers didn’t generally buy that the events of WandaVision were so disturbing to Elizabeth Olsen’s character that it justified her evil turn in Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness, and, based on the box office tracking, fans of the franchise aren’t super enthusiastic about seeing a mash-up of WandaVision, Ms. Marvel, and Captain Marvel.
But then there’s Monarch, which doesn’t need to waste any time on backstory character homework, save for one character whose connection to the movies seems more like a cute Easter egg than anything more practical. Set in the aftermath of Godzilla’s destruction of San Francisco in Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, Monarch doesn’t need to be much more than a show that takes place in a world where Godzilla exists. The narrative gaps and lingering mysteries of that world, specifically ones that haven’t been addressed by subsequent movies after Godzilla, aren’t super interesting—if there even are any.
The MonsterVerse is well-suited for TV
What is interesting, as Monarch recognizes, is looking at how Godzilla’s existence has impacted the lives of regular people. That wouldn’t work in Star Wars or Marvel, because there are Special People in those universes and so it seems silly to not focus on them, but the special thing in this world is Godzilla (and the other Titans like Kong) so just making sure they’re always in the background—whether that means literally or with special Godzilla bunkers or monster conspiracy theorists running around—goes a really long way to making the concept of the MonsterVerse moving to TV much more compelling.
Because of that, the MonsterVerse is not only particularly well-positioned to survive expanding to television, it might even thrive. There’s no reason Apple, or whoever, couldn’t do similar tie-in shows that take place after Godzilla: King Of The Monsters or Godzilla Vs. Kong with different characters reacting to the various city-smashing battles and physics-corrupting revelations of those films. But at the same time, those movies aren’t leaving huge gaps in the story that have to be filled in by things that happen on TV, which allows Monarch and hypothetical future shows to sit in the TV tie-in sweet spot between being interesting enough to justify their existence but not so interesting that they invalidate the movies.
That being said, Star Wars’ expansion to TV made sense when it was just The Mandalorian and Marvel’s expansion to TV made sense when it was just WandaVision, so maybe if the MonsterVerse gets a little too full of itself it will also grow too much and get stupid. But, given the relatively narrow scope of Monarch and the MonsterVerse (there’s just this one planet with Godzillas on it, after all), there’s a somewhat good chance that this cinematic universe can remain more reined-in than most of the others.
Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters premieres November 17 on Apple TV+.