Prey star Amber Midthunder goes from facing a Predator to running from kaiju as she joins Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Season 2
A new sci-fi genre icon in the making?
Legendary's MonsterVerse is in a pretty good spot after its last two crossover movies and Apple TV+'s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters surprisingly being one of the best super expensive tie-in shows based on big-screen properties. Now, it's juicing up its cast ahead of Season 2, and Amber Midthunder is first in line.
Variety broke the news on October 8, revealing the rising star is joining Season 2 of the show "in a heavily recurring role."
While Midthunder had already made a splash in TV shows like FX's Legion, it was the 2022 Predator prequel/spinoff Prey that made her one of Hollywood's new favourites and young talent to watch out for. As it stands, Prey 2 is happening at 20th Century Studios, but the creatives behind it are tackling an entirely different Predator standalone movie first.
After skillfully playing a Native American action heroine in Prey, it appears she might be a far less nice character in the MonsterVerse, as Isabel. Her role is briefly described as "an intelligent and powerful businesswoman." In case you hadn't noticed, businesspeople tend to be bad in these types of stories, but hey, Monarch could totally surprise us after the amount of curveballs that it threw at us during the show's first run.
The impressive cast for Season 1 included Kurt Russell, Wyatt Russell, Anna Sawai, Kiersey Clemons, Ren Watabe, Mari Yamamoto, Anders Holm, John Goodman, Joe Tippett, and Elisa Lasowski, among others. It was yet another sign of how stacked both Apple's shows and the MonsterVerse are, so we're expecting more new big names to go with Midthunder this time around.
Season 1 ended with a major time-bending surprise and the main lot of characters stuck on Skull Island with Apex Industries goons and reps just as the massive storm that consumed it before Godzilla vs. Kong started to ramp up. Also, Kong made a last-shot cameo. Plot details are being kept under wraps, but we're fully expecting it to cover the gap between the second Godzilla movie and GvK while continuing to tell its large-scale family drama.
Meanwhile, the next MonsterVerse 'event movie' is being written and prepared as we speak, with March 26, 2027, set as the tentative release date.