Director Adam Wingard has stepped away from franchise filmmaking in favour of the action-horror, Onslaught. “It was a difficult choice.”
With his Godzilla x Kong films racking up millions in profits, director Adam Wingard could theoretically have spent the rest of his career as a franchise filmmaker. Instead, it was announced in May 2024 that he had walked away from the third entry in the above-mentioned kaiju series, and was instead making the lower-budget action-horror, Onslaught.
That film – a Terminator-esque genre piece which Wingard wrote and directed – is in US cinemas now. And in an interview with TheWrap, the filmmaker has explained why he opted for the uncertainty of making an original indie piece rather than some Hollywood behemoth.
Although Wingard initially had every intention of making another Godzilla x Kong, he also wanted to finally get around to making Onslaught, which he’d had knocking around for several years; production company Legendary Entertainment was unwilling to wait for Wingard to be ready to make its next monster flick, and so the director faced a “difficult choice.”
“This is a franchise that’s on the rails and it ain’t coming off. They’re going to hit one of these every couple of years – as they should,” Wingard said. “I had a sort of Sophie’s Choice moment where I needed to make a decision one way or another – either I spend the next couple of years doing a Godzilla film, which I’d just done two, so I’ve been in that world for a while … Or I could do the thing that I’ve been putting off for a decade, which is doing a smaller, more personal project.”
Having previously directed Death Note and Blair Witch, both based on other creators’ properties, Wingard had a number of other ‘IP’ projects on the go, including a Thundercats adaptation and a sequel to the John Woo action film Face/Off.
Then the combination of becoming a father and a nasty road traffic accident prompted a change of priorities.
“I don’t regret it at all,” Wingard said. “This was the best decision I’ve ever made because I needed to remind people who I am as a filmmaker. Since The Guest, I’ve been working under other people’s stylistic rules that they’ve set within these IP and franchises. I felt like not only were people losing the script of who I was stylistically, but maybe they never quite knew because I went off on all these different tangents.”
Wingard says that if he were to return to franchise filmmaking, it would “need to be very personal to me in a different way.”
It’s a fascinating interview about the suffocating world of big, expensive movies – and how hard it is to decide between being a cog in a well-paid machine or breaking off to take a creative risk.
Onslaught is in US cinemas now; bizarrely, UK dwellers won’t get it until the 11th December 2026.
