At Comic-Con this year, Legendary stunned panel attendees by revealing that it was planning a new King Kong feature, titled Skull Island. The reveal wasn’t accompanied by much information, just a tantalizing teaser, but today brings a pretty major update about the project – one which also serves as a reassurance (as if we needed it) that Legendary isn’t wasting any time with this one.
According to Deadline, Legendary wants to give the directing gig to Attack the Block director Joe Cornish, who co-wrote Edgar Wright’s version of Ant-Man before both decamped in the face of script changes. He’d be working from a script by Godzilla scribe Max Borenstein “based on the mythic origins of King Kong, where mutant giant creatures rule.”
What that means exactly is unclear, but it seems unlikely that Skull Island‘s Kong would be dragged back to New York City by explorers and meet his fate on the pavement outside the Empire State Building, as we’ve seen in many films before.
Cornish has been offered a lot of big films since his Attack the Block, a spunky alien invasion thriller that followed a group of tough inner-city Londoners fending off hungry extraterrestrials, became a word-of-mouth phenomenon in 2011. To give one example, Universal wants him for the Aaron Berg-scripted Section Six, which charts the origins of British intelligence agency MI6. So there’s no telling whether Legendary will convince the director to join Skull Island – but such a huge movie has got to sound appealing to a relatively unknown helmer like him.
Skull Island has been set to arrive on November 4th, 2016, so if Cornish is going to come aboard, he’d likely be tackling this project next – a problem if he’s to helm Section Six for Universal. We’ll keep you posted as to which movie wins out in the end.