Godzilla *almost* made an appearance in Kong: Skull Island.

Currently at the top of the charts, Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island is nothing short of one of the most wildly entertaining movies to come along in recent years. Full of crazy monster action and driven by a ’70s soundtrack that I don’t ever want to stop listening to, Kong’s latest outing is easily his most fun to date, and it comes highly recommended by me personally.

Speaking with Empire, Vogt-Roberts just spilled some secrets about the film, revealing alternate opening and post-credits sequences that ended up on the cutting room floor. The director’s original vision for the film’s opening was pretty crazy, as he admits, and it would’ve seen World War II soldiers killing Kong within the first few minutes of the film. Well. Sort of.

Vogt-Roberts explained:

The alternate opening that I pitched to them, the studio said: ‘No. You’re crazy. You can’t do that.’ So it’s World War II. A full squad comes to this beach. They’re killing each other – and then suddenly, this giant monkey (that looks a lot like the monkey from the last King Kong movie) comes out of the jungle. And they just kill it. It’s dead. And you’re sitting there going, ‘wait, did they just kill King Kong? Did they kill the hero of this film?’

And then you’d hear a roar and see a much bigger creature – the real King Kong. That was the crazy version of me wanting to send a message that this isn’t like other King Kong movies that you’ve seen. The studio were like: ‘you can’t do that.’

What about the alternate post-credits scene? You’re going to love this…

We had a bunch of different variations for that. There was one version of that scene where [Tom Hiddleston’s character] Conrad and [Brie Larson’s character] Weaver were on a boat in the Arctic ocean with [Corey Hawkins’ character] Brooks. Conrad and Vernon say ‘what are we waiting for?’, and Brooks is like ‘hold on, hold on…’ – and then Godzilla surfaces and breaks through the ice.

But then we realized that doesn’t really jive with Godzilla, because in Godzilla, they say he hasn’t really surfaced since the atomic bomb tests. So it became this much more stripped down scene. The response to it has shocked me a little bit. It seems to be very evocative.

The post-credits scene in the final product teases the arrival of Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah, setting up the Michael Dougherty-directed Godzilla: King of the Monsters.