In the first season of “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” it’s revealed that Lee Shaw (played in the past by Wyatt Russell and in the present of 2015 by Kurt Russell), Bill Randa (Anders Holm), and Keiko Randa (Mari Yamamoto) first conducted the Monarch organization’s investigation into the existence of Hollow Earth, with the trio discovering a rift in Kazakhstan in 1959 that Keiko unfortunately fell into. When Shaw made his own excursion into Hollow Earth in 1962 as part of a recon mission, he found himself stuck in that realm for what he perceived as only a week, though when he made his way back to the surface, he found himself emerging in 1982. Later, in the season finale, Shaw went back through the rift and found a still alive, still young Keiko surviving despite the dangerous indigenous creatures and climate.
As it turns out, this realm that Shaw, Keiko, and others visit in the series is not Hollow Earth per se, but a particular offshoot realm that Keiko dubs Axis Mundi (a term that means “between Heaven and Earth”) in which time operates relative to the surface world in a very “Interstellar”-esque fashion. At a reception for an early screening of “Godzilla x Kong” that I attended a few weeks ago, director Adam Wingard essentially confirmed as much, stating during general conversation on the topic that the films’ Hollow Earth and Axis Mundi were not quite the same place. That said, the two realms are certainly related to each other, and the method of traveling to each realm requires the presence of a titan for humans to access.
