Kong: Skull Island – Alternate Pitch Sees Kong Die Early and Godzilla Make the Cut? More New Posters
The glory that is Kong: Skull Island (review) is currently rampaging through a theater near you, but that’s not stopping the news – or the posters for that matter – from coming!
Recently director Jordan Vogt-Roberts sat down with Empire and scooped them on his original pitch for the film’s opening and closing.
“The alternate opening that I pitched to them, the studio said: ‘No. You’re crazy. You can’t do that.’ So it’s World War II. A full squad comes to this beach. They’re killing each other – and then suddenly, this giant monkey (that looks a lot like the monkey from the last King Kong movie) comes out of the jungle. And they just kill it. It’s dead. And you’re sitting there going, ‘Wait, did they just kill King Kong? Did they kill the hero of this film?’”
“And then you’d hear a roar and see a much bigger creature – the real King Kong. That was the crazy version of me wanting to send a message that this isn’t like other King Kong movies that you’ve seen. The studio were like: ‘You can’t do that.’”
As for the post-credits sequence which had fans (myself included) squealing with joy, that was also pitched a bit differently…
“We had a bunch of different variations for that. There was one version of that scene where [Tom Hiddleston’s character] Conrad and [Brie Larson’s character] Weaver were on a boat in the Arctic Ocean with [Corey Hawkins’ character] Brooks. Conrad and Vernon say, ‘What are we waiting for?’, and Brooks is like, ‘Hold on, hold on…’ – and then Godzilla surfaces and breaks through the ice.”
“But then we realized that doesn’t really jive with Godzilla because in Godzilla they say he hasn’t really surfaced since the atomic bomb tests. So it became this much more stripped down scene. The response to it has shocked me a little bit. It seems to be very evocative.”
As for those new posters…
Jordan Vogt-Roberts directs the film from a screenplay by Max Borenstein, John Gatins, Dan Gilroy, and Derek Connolly. To fully immerse audiences in the mysterious Skull Island, the director, cast, and filmmaking team filmed across three continents over six months, capturing its primordial landscapes on Oahu, Hawaii; on Australia’s Gold Coast; and finally in Vietnam, where filming took place across multiple locations, some of which have never before been seen on film.
Kong: Skull Island (review) is in theaters NOW from Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company.
Kong: Skull Island stars Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman, and John C. Reilly. The international ensemble cast also includes Tian Jing, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, John Ortiz, Thomas Mann, Shea Whigham, Toby Kebbell, and Eugene Cordero.
Synopsis:
A diverse team of scientists, soldiers, and adventurers unite to explore a mythical, uncharted island in the Pacific, as dangerous as it is beautiful. Cut off from everything they know, the team ventures into the domain of the mighty Kong, igniting the ultimate battle between man and nature. As their mission of discovery becomes one of survival, they must fight to escape a primal Eden in which humanity does not belong.
Categorized:News
