The potential for the unusual collaboration was first brought to my attention on Twitter, by a user who has since deleted their profile. Nonetheless, after verifying a heap of their images with my own sources, two caught my attention. They were artwork of both King Kong and Godzilla in Call of Duty: Warzone. One image showed King Kong swatting a WW2 plane out of the sky whilst soldiers aimed rifles at him in the distance. The other image showed Godzilla destroying troops below with a bright blue beam. The images provided were concept art, and although I have seen hundreds of concept art pieces in the past, these two were interesting for one key reason: they were alongside Warzone Season 2 images. Ever since Warzone became an overnight hit upon release in March 2020, Activision and its developers have had bold plans for the title. However, due to the pre-launch expectation that Warzone would only be a one-year title, it was never future-proofed to last for years. This is the main reason why Warzone will be moving to “Warzone 2” once Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II releases, because the original Warzone lacks the underlying software capabilities needed to take the title one step further. In fact, ever since I heard about Warzone 2, the term “bold plans” has been brought up continuously, with comparisons to a Fortnite-style approach and its accompanying worldwide in-game events also being considered, with bigger spectacles than we have ever seen before in Call of Duty. At the moment though, it’s not entirely clear as to why both King Kong and Godzilla have been conceptualized in the World War 2 era of Warzone. It could be that it’s just to get an idea of how Warzone 2 could stage its big events moving forward, or Activision could be much more serious about the idea and it becomes the first true mass scale collaboration that we see between film and Call of Duty. The timing of such a collaboration does seem off though, as there are currently no MonsterVerse movies or TV series planned for the near future, so it is difficult to understand why such a combination would exist right now - something for the future perhaps? One developer suggested it could be that the images were used to pitch something like a Jurassic World Dominion collaboration in the summer and although that is purely based on speculation, these images and comments are nonetheless starting to paint a picture of what we might see in a more “out-sized” version of Warzone moving forward. It is unclear whether the current Warzone title could support such bold plans, but if it does, we could see 400-foot monsters roaming Caldera soon.
