Five Things We Know About Godzilla vs. Kong, and One Thing We Don't

With the first round of casting announcements for Godzilla vs. Kong finally here, I figured it’s time to recap the morsels of information we’ve been provided so far and speculate on what they might mean. In listicle form!

Season 2 of Kong: King of the Apes Gets Stranger, Remains Dull

Arad Animation and 41 Entertainment announced Kong: King of the Apes in 2014, with a premise that seemed tailor-made to geek site headlines. The Eighth Wonder of the World would be fighting robot dinosaurs in San Francisco circa 2050, a fugitive from justice thanks to the machinations of the scientist who created them. The 13-episode first season premiered on Netflix in early 2016, but I doubt most fans of the character made it through episode one. The CG animation was mediocre, the dialogue seemed to have been written by a predictive text generator for action-adventure cartoons, and its tame, jetpack-wearing Kong was unrecognizable. I watched all of it for two reasons: because, as previously established, I am a masochistic, completionist dolt, and because of Botila.

I envision a scenario in which a brave, principled screenwriter hacked into the computer responsible for cranking out this show’s scripts, but only had time to change one character. Botila is out of sync with Kong: King of the Apes in the best ways possible. She’s an android created by the human villain who barely tolerates him, heckling his schemes and always on the brink of declaring herself the leader of the Decepticons. (In the last episode, she finally shoves him off a cliff.) It’s not an exaggeration to say she gets all the best lines either. So my interest was piqued when the Season 2 trailer suggested she would be the main antagonist.