We haven't had the clearest look, at the new, super-sized King Kong from Kong: Skull Island, with good reason: it's always fun to hold something back. But firmly aware that images would probably get out anyway, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts has handed Entertainment Weekly the first real glimpse of his big ape. Check it out above.
Vogt-Roberts, who marshalled the likes of Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson and Brie Larson as well as an effects-born Kong for the movie, talked to the magazine about his visual cues for the new ape's design. "If anything, our Kong is meant to be a throwback to the ’33 version," he tells EW. "I don’t think there’s much similarity at all between our version and Peter Jackson’s Kong. That version is very much a scaled-up silverback gorilla, and ours is something that is slightly more exaggerated. A big mandate for us was, How do we make this feel like a classic movie monster?"
And he also appears to throw some less-than-subtle shade towards the storytelling ideas of a certain other big monster's recent movie... "We’re fundamentally not playing the same game that Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla did and most monster movies do, which I’m sort of sick of the notion that a monster movie needs to wait an hour or 40 minutes until the creature shows up," says Vogt-Roberts. "Kong traditionally does not show up in these movies until very, very late, and the monster traditionally does not show up until very, very late in a monster movie, so a lot of these movies tend to have this structure that’s a bit of a slow burn. Something about this movie made me want to reject that and play a very, very different game." So perhaps now we know what causes Kong and Godzilla to fight in some future movie: it's just a beef about their relative storylines. Also, possibly trailer size.
For more from Vogt-Roberts, head to EW's site. Kong: Skull Island will be with us on 10 March next year.
Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson star in a new Kong: Skull Island image.