Monarch: Legacy of Monsters producer explains how Titan X fits into the Monsterverse mythology

The show’s Titans, and what they stand for, continue to evolve

Apple TV’s Monsterverse TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters premiered in November 2023, just a month before the U.S. release of Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One. Monarch producer Tory Tunnell told Polygon in a video junket ahead of Monarch’s season 2 premiere that at the time, she worried that viewers would get tired of Godzilla. She isn’t worried about that anymore.

“More is more,” she said. “There’s so much there, and so much to mine.”

Monarch hops between the 1950s and the 2010s, chronicling the beginnings of the organization devoted to studying the enormous creatures dubbed Titans and its work following the events of Gareth Edwards’ 2014 film Godzilla, which launched Legendary Pictures’ Monsterverse. The season 1 finale jumped to 2017, to catch up with Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island. Season 2 pushes the story along toward Michael Dougherty’s 2019 film Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Adam Wingard’s 2021 film Godzilla vs. Kong, further developing Godzilla’s importance and the recklessness of Mechagodzilla creators Apex Cybernetics, while also introducing a very big new threat: Titan X.

“We don’t want to repeat what’s been done, but we want to actually make it all feel inevitable, all of a piece,” Tunnell said. “We want to have this [show] feel like something that keeps you guessing, keeps you wanting to tune in because you just don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

Titan X is a giant amphibious bioluminescent creature with impressive squid-like tentacles and two pupils in each of its eyes. Throughout season 2, Monarch is trying to figure out how to keep Titan X from hurting people, even as other forces want to use the creature for their own goals.

“It felt like it would be really fun to surprise audiences with something they haven’t seen before, and to have that mystery box,” Tunnell said. “What is this monster? Why is he here? What is it all about? Because it was something that we were creating, it was really bespoke to our narrative, and to the issues our characters are facing, and how they are responsible in some ways for this monster. What is the legacy of the monsters they’ve created, both metaphorically and literally?”

Beyond developing the mythology of Legendary Pictures’ Monsterverse, Tunnell said she’s watching the way Godzilla has been portrayed very differently across contemporary Japanese films. The kaiju, first seen in Ishirô Honda’s 1954 movie Godzilla, was originally a metaphor for the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 2016’s Shin Godzilla used him as a stand-in for the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that led to a nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Godzilla Minus One used his threat to make an argument that Japan should remilitarize because the nation can’t rely on anyone else.

“These monsters have always represented this existential threat that we can’t quite quantify,” Tunnell said. “When we started [developing Monarch] in 2018, we were saying the monsters were a metaphor for global warming. Now it’s COVID. Now it’s ‘name your [metaphor].’ It just keeps on evolving. I think that’s why it’s been able to be so expansive, to be able to sort of marry the Toho Monsterverse with the Legendary Monsterverse. It’s all of a piece, because it all fundamentally goes back to that idea that monsters represent things out of our control.”

The Monsterverse will continue to expand with a spin-off led by Monarch star Wyatt Russell, which will begin shooting this spring. Set in the 1980s, it will cover what Russell’s Monarch character, army officer Lee Shaw, was doing after Monarch’s founders both disappeared.

“It’s a total departure. This is going to be a Cold War spy thriller with monsters behind enemy lines, a little bit more punk rock than our hero show. You don’t need to have seen any of the movies, or even Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, to go watch it and fall in love,” Tunnell said. “That’s one thing that’s always going to be imperative to us. How do we invite new people in? How do we keep those superfans engaged?”

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Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 premieres on Apple TV on Feb. 27. Future episodes will release Fridays through May 1.