10 Best Opening Credits Sequences In Movie History

6. Godzilla (2014)

Godzilla is a rather large lizard with a rather large mythos behind him - so how do you go about adapting his tale into a digestible feature-film? Do you spend a chunk of time on backstory and exposition, or do you get straight to what everybody really wants to see; a giant monster wrecking everything in sight?

It's a tough question, but one that Gareth Edwards' 2014 reboot answered in a smart fashion - it used the opening credits to fill in a few of the blanks surrounding Godzilla's origin, how us humans dealt with news of his existence, and what the beast has been up to over the years.

This way, the film could spend more time on the more important elements of the present-day plot, rather than having an extra thirty minutes tacked on purely to explore how Godzilla came to be.

This sequence worked well because while it did give us a couple of details regarding the giant creature, it still left him shrouded in mystery. Godzilla works better when he's an enigma, and the way these credits used black-and-white archive footage, quick cuts and redacted text ensured that we got just enough to understand what was going on, but not so much that it demystified everyone's favourite towering lizard.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!