After The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King had concluded one of cinema’s all-time great trilogies, becoming just the second movie in history to earn over a billion dollars at the box office before going on to win eleven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, Peter Jackson had cemented himself as one of the most powerful filmmakers in the industry.
With the newfound creative freedom and clout to do whatever he wanted, Jackson did what a lot of people would surely love to do in his position, and decided to remake his favorite film. 2005’s King Kong was the most expensive production in history at the time with a budget of $207 million, and it received strong reviews from critics while hauling in over $562 million globally.
Godzilla vs Kong director Adam Wingard recently revealed that Jackson had approached him about helming a potential King Kong sequel, in a turn of events that’s now fittingly come full circle after the 38 year-old eventually got his chance to tackle cinema’s pre-eminent giant ape. And in a new interview, Wingard offered up some details about the project, which would have moved the action from the 1930s to the present day.
“It was just going to be called Skull Island .It was going to be a modern day kind of thing, very different from what Kong: Skull Island ended up being. So that project went away, and I went away with it. I remember [Legendary’s] Mary Parent talking about my pitch for Skull Island, and she seemed to remember thinking it was great. I don’t remember it hardly at all. I remember a couple of details. It was modern day. There was some sort of opening scene where characters were in a museum and they’re talking. Then at the end of the scene, it’s revealed that the museum has these giant King Kong bones. He’s like this relic from the past and Skull Island is this sort of myth and nobody knows what happened to it. And somehow these characters are going back there.”
The King Kong sequel never made it out of development, but Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Skull Island brought the character roaring back to life as the star of a 1970s war epic, leading directly into Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong. It’s funny how these things often tend to work out in the end, and now the MonsterVerse is dominating the headlines as fans call for further adventures focusing on the two iconic title heroes at the center of Warner Bros.’ latest smash hit.