“Godzilla: King of Monsters,” the upcoming sequel to 2014’s “Godzilla” Hollywood reboot of the classic Japanese monster, is bolstering its cast with various actors who have made their names in hugely popular films and TV shows of late.
Michael Doughetry, director of the f*cked up Christmas horror comedy “Krampus” is in the director’s chair, working from a screenplay he’s written in collaboration with Zach Shields, with whom he also wrote “Krampus.” A huge-scale, big-budget “Godzilla” movie will be a departure for them from a small weird Film set on one street in which gingerbread men kick the sh*t out of David Koechner, but they’re surely up to the challenge.
O’Shea Jackson, Jr. is very close to signing a deal to get himself a role in “Godzilla: King of Monsters.” He’s best known for portraying his father Ice Cube in “Straight Outta Compton,” in which he proved the nepotism-accusing haters wrong with a powerful performance that was overlooked in the #OscarsSoWhite controversy.
The cast is already pretty star-studded
The “Godzilla: King of Monsters” cast already includes some big names: Millie Bobby Brown, better known as Eleven in Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” in her feature film debut, Kyle Chandler from “Friday Night Lights,” “Super 8,” and Netflix’s “Bloodline” (the casting director is clearly a fan of Netflix originals), and Vera Farmiga from “Up in the Air,” “The Departed,” and “Bates Motel.”
Ken Watanabe is set to reprise his role from the 2014 “Godzilla” movie as Dr.
Ishiro Serizawa (see, they didn’t whitewash it completely). However, he’s the only one coming back. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen, the stars of the original with an ambiguously open end for their characters, will not be returning to our screens two years from now to reprise their roles. Neither will “Breaking Bad” star Bryan Cranston, but that was a given, right?
His character died horribly in the first film.
It must be some correlation between movies about giant monsters and their stars not wanting to return for sequels, not just with "Godzilla." The upcoming “Pacific Rim: Uprising,” the long-awaited, belated sequel to Guillermo Del Toro’s epic 2013 sci-fi actioner and love letter to the kaiju genre of Japanese cinema, “Pacific Rim,” lost its original star Charlie Hunnam in favour of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” star John Boyega.
Idris Elba is also gone. In that case, will it even be worth watching?
The movie isn’t being released until 2019
“Godzilla: King of Monsters” is set to be released in cinemas on 22 March 2019, so it’s still a long, long way off yet (just about exactly two years), but in the meantime, enjoy “Kong: Skull Island,” currently playing in cinemas, which ties into the same “MonsterVerse” shared cinematic world as 2014’s “Godzilla” and its sequel.