Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is an insane TV series, both in concept and in execution. Apple’s streaming series has brought the cinematic titans of Godzilla, King Kong, and a plethora of other Kaiju to the small screen with its largely successful series. However, the show does beg the asking of an essential question: should these monumental characters really be on TV?
The lines between TV and film have never been more blurred than they are right now. At the dawn of television, there were some clear, hardline distinctions that separated it from the theatrical movie-going experience in palpable ways. For starters, it brought the media directly into your home, forcing the work to meet you on your own frequency, rather than you having to meet it on its turf, in the dark of a cinemaplex. Furthermore, TV series’ had the benefit of establishing recurring characters and elongated relationships with audiences in a way that film simply didn’t. Thus, what TV might have lacked in terms of scale, spectacle, or immersion, it made up for with long-term emotional connections and familiarity.
However, over the course of the past decade-plus, all of this has changed in substantial ways, as each of these two formerly distinct mediums have begun to bleed into one another. As interconnected movie universes, ala the MCU, became common practices, movies began to be able to mine that same kind of long-term emotional investment and return policy that TV had long specialized in. Simultaneously, thanks to the streaming wars, many high-profile TV series’ began to get ever-larger budgets, resulting in shows such as Game of Thrones or Stranger Things, where a single season of television was able to dwarf entire cinematic productions in terms of cost.
Which brings us all the way back to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a series set within the MonsterVerse, a sprawling interconnected series of media containing movies, comics, and television. A single season of Monarch costs easily as much, if not more, than a feature-length MonsterVerse film does to produce. While the first season featured Godzilla, the second season features both the King of Monsters and Kong. These characters each have decade-spanning histories terrorizing moviegoers, but Monarch marks a distinct change of pace in bringing fully-realized, live-action iterations of these characters to TV.
But even when Godzilla and Kong are rendered with state-of-the-art visual effects with seemingly unlimited budgets utilized, does seeing these creatures on a TV screen while you’re sitting on your couch really have the same impact as seeing them on a giant screen in a movie theater? I would argue that the answer to that question is: definitely not.
Something that movie theaters still do much better than even the most advanced of at-home viewing experiences can is size, scale, and impact. From the literal size of the image to the ways in which the sound is able to encompass you, to the ways you are able to lose yourself within the darkened theater under optimal conditions, movie theaters are simply better for these kinds of grandiose spectacles. This is something that even the most anti-movie theater streamer, Netflix, had begrudgingly realized, as projects like K-Pop: Demon Hunters and even Stranger Things have made their way to theaters in the last year to incredibly positive results.
I say all of this to say that for as good as Monarch can be, and for as technically accomplished as its monstrous characters’ appearances are, something about the whole thing just doesn’t feel right. When Kong and Godzilla came face-to-face for the first time in decades on the big-screen in Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong, it felt like a massive, ground-shaking event. Now, with Monarch, these two just pop in and out like they are featured guests on a run-of-the-mill sitcom. To me, that indicates a complete misunderstanding of what makes film and TV work independently of one another.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 is streaming now on Apple TV.