San Diego Comic-Con is, without question, the bona fide heavyweight among the industry’s list of annual conventions, so it’s only appropriate that Warner Bros. preps to unveil its monstrous epic Kong: Skull Island at SDCC next weekend.
To stoke the embers of excitement, Entertainment Weekly has premiered an eerie new still for Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ reboot, which sees Tom Hiddleston and Room star Brie Larson on the hunt under the shadow of a colossal skull.
Ditching the romantic, beauty and the beast themes found in the original, Jordan Vogt-Roberts is gunning for a decidedly different tone with Skull Island, which is set to feature the biggest Kong ever seen on the big screen – go big or go home, then. Perhaps in preparation for the ape’s inevitable tussle with Toho’s King of Monsters in Godzilla Vs. King Kong, Warner and Vogt-Roberts have consciously created their beast to be gigantic, and the filmmaker told EW that Kong’s gravitas is comparable to that of a god.
“We’re very explicitly not telling the beauty and the beast story. The original is a classic, the ’70s version is great for what it is, and Peter [Jackson]’s version is a great retelling of the 1933 film. The thing that most interested me was, how big do you need to make [Kong], so that when someone lands on this island and doesn’t believe in the idea of myth, the idea of wonder – when we live in a world of social and civil unrest, and everything is crumbling around us, and technology and facts are taking over – how big does this creature need to be, so that when you stand on the ground and you look up at it, the only thing that can go through your mind is: ‘That’s a god.’”
Rubbing shoulders with Hiddleston and Larson on that titular, primordial isle are Legend of Tarzan‘s Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, Tian Jing, Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton), Jason Mitchell, John Ortiz, Thomas Mann, Shea Whigham, Toby Kebbell and Eugene Cordero.
Kong: Skull Island will roar onto screens on March 10, 2017.
