Godzilla's New Look In Godzilla X Kong, Properly Explained By The Filmmakers

We love Godzilla, don't we folks? Our big chonky boy has been stomping on cities for 70 years, and he shows no signs of slowing down. Heck, we recently got two wonderful Godzilla movies. There's the excellent, Oscar-winning "Godzilla Minus One," which just recently hit Netflix, and then there's the wonderfully silly MonsterVerse entry "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire." These movies take very different approaches to Big G, proving how flexible and malleable the character is. In "Godzilla Minus One," the big lizard represents the horrors of war, while in "Godzilla x Kong" he's kind of like a giant cat who takes long naps and then wakes up to smash sh*t. 

While Kong gets most of the screentime in "Godzilla x Kong," Godzilla still pops up to make his presence known, especially during the movie's big action-packed climax. And when Godzilla finally shows up to do his thing at the end of the movie, he has a brand-new look. Now, a cynical person might say this new visage merely exists to sell toys — "Give Godzilla something new so we can make it an action figure!" a studio executive might've said at some point. But based on the special features on the recent "Godzilla x Kong" Blu-ray release, it sounds like the idea of giving Godzilla a new look came directly from director Adam Wingard. 

In a behind-the-scenes featurette included on the new "Godzilla x Kong" Blu-ray release, Wingard states: "I wanted to give Godzilla a new look, but I wanted to make sure it was motivated by something going on in the movie in that we would actually see the evolution happen within the film."

The evolution Wingard mentions occurs after Godzilla decides he needs to charge himself up for the impending climactic battle. To do so, he goes to the undersea lair of the titan Tiamat. After a scuffle, Godzilla kills Tiamat and then lays down for a nap in the monster's glowing radioactive cave. There, Godzilla absorbs the radiation, and when he finally emerges, he has a new glow, and a new look overall. He's leaner, more muscular, and, most exciting of all, he has pink scales on his back.

As Wingard further explains: "His head is bigger, he's got these elbow spikes that we unfortunately don't really use in the movie, but they look really cool." "Looking cool" seems to be the ultimate goal of "Godzilla x Kong," a film that features a scene where a bunch of giant monsters fight each other while flipping around in zero gravity. As for those pink scales, they have a pretty amusing explanation. As Wingard puts it: "Pink and blue are my favorite colors, so it was kind of only natural that I push Godzilla in that direction."

So there you have it: Godzilla gets a new look partially because pink is one of Adam Wingard's favorite colors. Wingard then sums things up nicely: "Literally, Godzilla does change his skin, he becomes a new thing in this movie ... I always wanted to be on the edge, and Godzilla's new design does that." 

"Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire" is now on digital, 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD.