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Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson get serious cricks in their necks as they stare up to the sky to take in the full majesty of the titular ape in monster mash-up Kong: Skull Island, available now on Virgin Movies. Despite Kong’s new girth – he’s been beefed up to fight Godzilla in a crossover movie in 2020 – we’re not sure he’s the biggest movie monster in the pack. In fact, compared to some of the loftier creatures in this feature, he’s quite the little monkey: King Kong ain’t got nuthin’ on them…

King Kong

As seen in: Kong: Skull Island (2017)

Height: 100ft

Equivalent London buses: 7

Prepare for the ape-ocalypse. Either Kong has been htting the gym or he's been on some serious steroids, because this monkey is hench. He's quadrupled in size since he first hit the scene in the 30s, which is bad news for Tom Hiddleston and his crew, who are tasked with taking the beast in. Hope you have a big van, Tom.

Smaug

As seen in: The Hobbit trilogy (2012-2014)

Height/Length: 200ft

Equivalent London buses: 14

Dragons don't really tend to come on the small size, but Smaug really tips the scales. Approximately 200 feet from nose to tail, he's a quite magnificent beast with one amazingly blinged-out crib. How Bilbo Baggins avoided becoming a fleshy morsel stuck in his ginormous teeth is beyond us.

Clover

As seen in: Cloverfield (2007)

Height: 268ft

Equivalent London buses: 18.5

Of the many oversized alien tourists to trash New York, Clover isn't the largest, but he is almost certainly the ugliest, with big scrawny insect legs, weird puffy eyes and a face that screams 'swat me with the world's biggest fly swatter'. There aren't enough cans of Raid in the world to take down this mega-bug.

Godzilla

As seen in: Godzilla (2014)

Height: 384ft

Equivalent London buses: 26

Godzilla too has grown in size over the years – exposure to nuclear material will tend to have that effect on a mutant lizard – and in his latest iteration, he was big enough to block out the sun. At almost four times the size of his ape opponent, we're struggling to see how Godzilla vs King Kong could possibly be a fair fight.

Slattern

As seen in: Pacific Rim (2013)

Height: 596ft

Equivalent London buses: 41

The biggest, baddest Kaiju to slither through the inter-dimensional breach in Guillermo del Toro's epic monster movie, this Category 5 monstrosity towers over mankind's remaining Jaegers. You'd expect humanity's final boss to be plus-sized, but this charming creature practically has his own postcode. Thankfully the Jaegers sent the comically over-sized Kaiju to a watery grave.

Sando Aqua Monster

As seen in: Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999)

Height/Length: 650ft

Equivalent London buses: 45

By far the largest creature in the Star Wars universe, this aquatic beast is like the underwater equivalent of a Super Star Destroyer. Lithe and muscular but quite ridiculously large at full length, the Sando was thought to be a monster of myth until Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan narrowly escaped from one in the waters of Naboo. Qui-Gon jokes “There's always a bigger fish,” but actually he's wrong: there are no bigger fish than this fella.

Unicron

As seen in: Transformers: The Movie (1986)

Height: 1,000km

Equivalent London buses: 3,280,839

Okay, show's over folks, we have a winner, nothing to see here, just a planet-sized Transformer who can devour entire civilisations before breakfast. Unicron – voiced by Orson Welles, the man with the world's biggest voice – is the scourge of the universe and is by far the largest character in all of pop culture history. He almost certainly has his clothes specially made.

Kong: Skull Island is available on Virgin Movies. Find it in On Demand > Movies