The Monster-verse (also styled as MonsterVerse) is an American multimedia film franchise and co-series starring Godzilla and other animated spin-off characters owned and created by Toho Co, Ltd, as well as King Kong. The franchise consists of five films and two television series that were produced by Legendary Pictures, with Warner Bros. Pictures distributing the films and the series released for streaming on Netflix and Apple TV+. This franchise has received a generally positive critical reception and has grossed $2.522 billion worldwide at the box office.

The Monster-verse, an expansive cinematic universe, kicked off its legacy with Godzilla in 2014, followed by Kong: Skull Island in 2017, Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 2019 and the epic Godzilla vs. Kong showdown in 2021. In the latest, director Adam Wingard returns to lead the monster spectacle in the next release, the biggest in the franchise.

Kong, who lives in Hollow Earth, where most of the film takes place (Hollow Earth is a land that I've never really liked the idea of, as it seems like the earthly version of a storage basement), is assumed to be the last of his kind, but discovers an ape boy who actually looks like an homage to the plush creature from the 1967 Japanese film “Son of Godzilla.” This gorilla boy leads Kong to a tribe of hostile, ragged apes living in a slave society presided over by King Skar, an evil ape with spotted red hair who is as tall as Kong and wields a skeletal bone whip that looks like it was made from the backbone of a sea serpent. He also commands, as a personal weapon of mass destruction, a bizarre gigantoid creature that is like a stegosaurus that has been left in the frozen and, in fact, its main power is a breath ray that can turn anything, including the mighty Kong, into ice.

And then there's the essential way in which “Godzilla x Kong,” the fifth entry in the Monster-verse, plays a great deal like the umpteenth installment of a superhero franchise. The film is peppered with occasional creature battles, but for the first 90 minutes it mostly devotes itself to coloring the backstory of its world-construction. (Godzilla and Kong have a complicated connection to their place in the on-earth cosmos, and the story goes through great lengths to transform them from enemies into comrades.

The original release date of April 12 had placed Godzilla x Kong in a good position, offering it a clean path to secure the top spot at the box office, without opposition from major releases. With the new March 29 release date, the film still enjoys a vacant opening slot, which guarantees minimal competition on its opening weekend. Even with the change, Godzilla x Kong is expected to dominate the box office, given the absence of significant rivals on March 29.

Where the last film succeeded was director Adam Wingard's judicious modulation of tone, which removed the dark foreboding of Gareth Edwards' crazily self-serious 2014 offering and brought the fun that Michael Dougherty's lousy sequel failed to deliver. He's wisely brought back for more and it's refreshing to see that he keeps matters light, his film a cheeky burst of color at a time when too many blockbusters of this scale are lost in obscurity (it's surely the most pink Godzilla movie to date). But the script, crafted by a team of three who are also trying to keep their cool, is far less effective. Of course, human time is never going to be a priority in these films (Wingard even admitted it would be even less important this time around), but the dialogue often goes from merely superficial to actively terrible. In attempting to align itself with Wingard's wit, the screenplay punishes in-jokes so amazingly, shamefully humorless, that we find ourselves just imploring Godzilla to silence all of them with one of his feet.