Bad beasts, bad beasts, whatcha gonna do?
Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: the MonsterVerse is a thing! Once enough time had passed since Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla and Peter Jackson’s King Kong, the blockbuster peddlers at Legendary Pictures decided America was ready once again for rude giant animals to crush everything in their paths and possibly dominate theaters. Their Avengers-style interconnected saga began with 2014’s recycle-titled Godzilla, which delivered one truly mighty monster melee after two hours of ordinary humans reminding us what we didn’t like about the previous five decades’ predecessors. Pop culture’s most popular overtall simian returned in 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, a period-piece prequel that shamelessly embraced kaiju camp, OD’d on steroids and let its creatures run amuck through Apocalypse Now backdrops and chase some of the best character actors in the biz. The humans were suspiciously more entertaining and having way more fun than usual, as monster toe-jam ingredients go.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 