The '80s Buddy-Cop Classic That Inspired Godzilla X Kong

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack's classic monster movie "King Kong" was released in 1933, so the monster turns 91 years old in 2024. That means he's definitely too old for this sh*t. 

In Adam Wingard's 2021 film "Godzilla vs. Kong," the 70-year-old nuclear gorilla-whale and the 91-year-old mega-ape, both drawn by an ineffable, in-born monstrous instinct, had to fight. Over the course of many decades, Godzilla movies have taught us that if two kaiju ever appear in the same film, they instantly hate one another and have to start wailing on each other. It won't be until a tertiary monster appears — usually an "evil" one — that the primary and secondary monsters put aside their differences and team up to hang a beatin' on the new guy. This is what happened in "Godzilla vs. Kong." At first, the title monsters were enemies. When Mechagodzilla appeared, however, Kong and Godzilla pounded the interloper into the dirt. At the end of the day, Kong and Godzilla had become uneasy friends. 

This seems to be where Wingard's upcoming film "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" picks up. The monsters are now buddies. The "x" in the title denotes a collaboration, so perhaps Godzilla will provide guest vocals for Kong's latest pop track. At the very least, as seen in a recent Super Bowl spot, they'll team up again to fight a wicked usurper to the monster throne, the giant ape, Skar King. 

In a new interview with Empire Magazine, Wingard described the relationship between Godzilla and Kong as being similar to that of Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) in Richard Donner's 1987 cop classic "Lethal Weapon." 

In "Lethal Weapon," Riggs and Murtaugh are forced to work together after Riggs' constant erratic behavior (he is despondent over the recent death of his wife). The two cops don't get along, and they have wildly different investigation styles, but they seem to understand one another right away. It's hardly the first "mismatched-buddy-cop" movie, but it codified a lot of what the genre was capable of. "Lethal Weapon" was an enormous hit, spawning sequels and a TV series, and leaving a long trail of imitators in its wake. Its influence was certainly felt by Wingard, who was five years old when the first "Lethal Weapon" opened in theaters; he, like many his age, likely grew up watching Donner's film and its sequels on cable TV. 

Wingard notes the "uneasy truce" between Godzilla and Kong in his new film as being comparable to cops who work well together, even if they often bicker. He said: 

"There's a bit of a truce — Godzilla's in control of the surface world and Kong is down in Hollow Earth. [...] It wasn't, 'Okay, give me a call when something goes wrong, Kong. And I, Godzilla, will rush to the rescue!' [...] The buddy-cop dysfunctional relationship dynamic is probably the best one to describe Godzilla and Kong. My influences are always embedded with the '80s, and the '80s were prime for [that] storyline.  [...] There's a lot of misunderstanding — the way that the monsters communicate isn't straightforward."

Indeed, the monsters don't speak in most of the Godzilla movies. Traditionally, only Mothra's fairy helpers can aid in translation. Only in 1974's "Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla" will the monsters be given on-screen subtitles. 

Wingard also pointed to a second '80s classic as a central influence on "Godzilla x Kong," or more specifically, a Chinese genre studio that produced several notable kung-fu classics throughout the '70s and '80s. A brief history. A company called Tianyi Film Company was established in Singapore in 1925 by brothers Runje, Runme, Runde, and Run Run Shaw. In 1958, the Hong Kong arm of the company was taken over by Runme and Run Run, becoming Shaw Brothers. Beginning in the '50s and continuing for decades, the Shaw Bros. oversaw a renaissance of martial arts pictures, many of which were exported to North America. Among their films are such classics as "The One-Armed Swordsman," "Duel of the Iron Fist," "The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires," "The 36th Chamber of Shaolin," "Five Deadly Venoms," and "Eight Diagram Pole Fighter."

Many of those films, as one might intuit, feature training montages or sequences wherein a strong fighter becomes stronger. In "Godzilla x Kong," Godzilla will transform from a monster that breathes blue nuclear blasts ... to one that fires pink nuclear blasts. Of the transformation, Wingard said: 

"This is his version of a training routine. [...] I'm really big into Shaw Brothers martial arts. Those films are always about, 'Here's a big threat, and you have to do all these things to pump yourself up so that you can take on that threat.' [...] You're gonna see lots of different versions of Godzilla in this movie."

"Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" is due in theaters on March 26, 2024.