Despite the fact that Monarch: Legacy of Monsters first premiered back in 2023, it can still feel a bit surreal to realize that there’s an honest-to-god live-action Godzilla TV show out there in the world.
The Apple TV series stars Kurt Russell and Wyatt Russell as the same character, Lee Shaw, across different periods in time. It follows Shaw's journey and dives deep into the lore of Legendary’s MonsterVerse, the franchise which includes the likes of Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla and Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong.
The entire hook of the series from the get-go was to capture what it would be like to be a real person living in this universe filled with gargantuan monsters and Titan terrors, and the show has done a solid job of capturing that anxiety time and again over the course of its two seasons thus far. However, in order to do that, it necessitates the occasional presence of actual Titans, which has resulted in the show being (surprise, surprise) a very costly endeavor for all parties involved.
Monarch season 3 will reportedly press reset on the story
To this end, the fact that the second season underperformed when compared to the first has resulted in discussions between Apple TV and Legendary emerging about how to reboot the series and make it a more profitable endeavor moving forward. This would include a substantial creative overhaul, entirely new showrunners, and possibly even a new cast, according to a Variety report with all the details about the reboot.
This is interesting for numerous reasons, chief among them being that the MonsterVerse as a whole is already mid-pivot. The next mainline film in the franchise, Godzilla x Kong: Supernova, has been reported to be moving away from the more pulpy tone of the prior entries and looking to return to something more (relatively speaking) grounded. That film is scheduled for release in 2027, so the fact that Monarch, which was previously used as a positive comparison point in terms of the tone the new threequel would be aiming for, is now undergoing an overhaul of its own before Supernova even releases is quite strange.
But also, there is already another Monarch project in development right now, which is a spinoff centered entirely around Wyatt Russell’s younger version of Lee Shaw. The series is to be set entirely in 1984, rather than jumping back and forth across timelines as Monarch-prime does. The spinoff was announced back when the second season of Monarch first released, which now leaves it in this weird kind of limbo state if the entire series is now getting a creative refresh.
It’s all quite strange and speaks to the complicated and often convoluted nature of attempting to run one of these giant interconnected franchises. If one domino gets a bit wobbly, the entire infrastructure of the whole thing is impacted by it. The second season of Monarch was not as positively received as the first, so it would appear that Apple TV and Legendary are keen to rethink things moving forward, for creative and financial reasons.
Stay tuned for more news about Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 3!
Add us as a preferred source on Google