October 22, 2025

Recently, I watched Freddy vs. Jason. It wasn’t very good, but it was a charming watch that was at least entertaining. But as I watched Freddy fling Jason around like a pinball and Jason continuously get up to keep fighting, even after the most extreme of injuries, I couldn’t help but think about the ‘versus’ horror movie and how it’s really a fad of a bygone era.

The early 2000s saw a few high-profile horror crossovers, where legendary movie monsters did battle on the big screen. Take the previously mentioned Freddy vs. Jason or the Alien vs. Predator duology. While the quality of these films may be… low, they each handily made back their budget and multiple times more at the box office. But since then, when it comes to crossing over mainstream, Hollywood movie monsters, there’s been nothing. But how, in today’s age of endless sequels, remakes, and crossovers, have we not seen more of these? And will we see anymore? Before we answer that, let’s go over a history of these monumental crossovers and see what that may reveal.

The Origins

Arguably, the first of these “versus” crossover monster movies was Universal’s 1943 film Frankenstein meets Wolf Man. This film came after roughly two decades of Universal’s iconic monster movies, but in the late 30s and 40s, the studio began to experiment with taking these characters and ideas in new directions. To make sequels, they would usually go the route of gender-swapping the monster or focusing on the character’s child or a new environment for them to haunt. Frankenstein was successful? Well, they made Bride of Frankenstein. The Invisible Man did well? We got The Invisible Woman! Werewolf in London is popular? Now he’s The Wolf Man and he’s in Wales.

All of these to say, after tons of these films, the creatives were looking for a new way to continue making films with these characters. After deliberation on which characters to crossover and how to pull it off, it was decided that Frankenstein’s monster would meet (and fight) each other. Surprisingly (and maybe unsurprising in some ways), the film was a middling release critically and commercially. Thus, while there were two more “monster rally” or crossover films after this, this mostly ended the monster fights between the Universal classics.

About a decade later, the tokusatsu classic Godzilla released and quickly garnered international fame. As Japan’s cinematic reach grew, it was clear that Godzilla was a franchise ripe for sequels. Inherent to Godzilla as a character is large scale. With this in mind, it’s unsurprising that less than ten year’s after the first film’s release, Godzilla clashed with another giant monster in 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla. This film quickly became an international sensation, with Universal acquiring the rights and releasing the film in other markets (including the US). From there, Godzilla would become the focal point of numerous Kaiju crossovers, with many of the monsters coming from the Godzilla mythos. After a boom in the 60s and 70s, these crossover films died down and wouldn’t reach international success again until Legendary Pictures’ Monsterverse began releasing crossovers in the late 2010s to today.

What Went Wrong?

Maybe the root cause for a lot of this is the simple fact that these movies can be hard to pull off for little-to-no critical success. Freddy vs. Jason is perhaps the best example of this. While it has a cult following today and did well enough in the box office, it was in development hell for nearly twenty years, only to release to middling reviews. Interestingly, many of these films are financially successful, however in the grand scheme of things, these crossovers have never made their way back to the big screen.

Largely, these crossovers have been relegated to comic books (like Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash and Marvel Zombies vs. The Army of Darkness) and video games (like Mortal Kombat X‘s iconic horror icon DLC). These products and smaller scale pieces of media are also generally financially successful and almost certainly take less money up front and less logistical agreements between the different rights holders.

So, with this in mind, will we ever get back to frequent monster fighting madness? In my opinion, yes! As mentioned before, this decade has actually seen the release of new Godzilla crossovers, and there have been frequent talks of a new big screen crossover between Alien and Predator (this is all but confirmed in promotional material for the upcoming Predator: Badlands, as Alien franchise technology and iconography are seen). Jason Vorhees, whose troubling rights agreements had made him a real hassle to try to crossover with, finally entered into a new era and has already appeared in this year’s Fortnite Halloween event.

It’s interesting to consider how this cycle of monster movies has fluctuated in and out of mainstream consciousness. But, perhaps soon we will be seeing frequent releases in this niche subgenre, if only for a while. And in the meantime, this week would be a great time to throw one of these on.

Happy Halloween!