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‘Kong: Skull Island’: Details And A First-Look Photo Of The ‘King Kong’ Reboot Starring Tom Hiddleston And Brie Larson

By Nicole Giacobone
Published on: 14:09 PST, Jul 17, 2016

Hailed as the “Ninth Wonder of the World” in fiction, King Kong has captivated the cinematic audience for nearly 83 years. Kong: Skull Island director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, hopes to get movie fans excited with an exclusive photo of the upcoming fantasy-action flick, claiming that the film will be spectacular and epic.

On July 15, Entertainment Weekly released the first exclusive image of a scene from Kong: Skull Island that is also featured on their Instagram account. The image shows the movie’s stars Tom Hiddleston, recent Oscar winner Brie Larson, and two other actors walking among bones, including a very large skull in the background.

When Vogt-Roberts had the movie in his mind, he wanted his King Kong reboot to stand out from the previous films in the franchise, including super-sizing the famous mega-ape in the film.

“From the size of the skull, you can tell that things on this island are much bigger than audiences are used to with traditional Kong lore. Our Kong is by far the biggest Kong that you’ve seen on screen, and that translates to a lot of different things on the island.”

The Kong:Skull Island director watched and studied the other King Kong films to determine how big he wanted his Kong to be in his film.

“Peter Jackson’s Kong was around 25 feet. The ’33 Kong ranged between 25 feet and 50 feet, I want to say he was 50-plus feet when he was on the Empire State Building. He varied in size dramatically! The ’70s Kong was somewhere between them.”

The latest movie in the King Kong franchise takes place in the 1970s. Vogt-Roberts considers that era a good time to tell the story in the movie when there were still many areas in the world still unknown.

It was during the 1970s that NASA launched its satellite program that became LANDSAT, which gave satellites a feature to map parts of the world from outer space. Vogt-Roberts used that bit of information for his film when an unknown island pops up in the Pacific ocean and a crew goes to investigate the land.

Kong: Skull Island stars The Night Manager’s Tom Hiddleston as a former British SAS tracker Captain James Conrad, with rumored Marvel Girl prospect Brie Larson playing war photographer Weaver. Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Wilkinson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, and Straight Outta Compton star Jason Mitchell are also part of the cast.

The film initially had J.K. Simmons and Michael Keaton on board to co-star with Hiddleston. On July 2015, there was an announcement that Simmons and Keaton bowed out of Kong: Skull Island due to conflicting schedules. On August 6, 2015, the studio signed Jackson to replace Simmons in the movie.

While King Kong will be a main feature in the film, Vogt-Roberts says that he doesn’t want the film to be another rendition of the “beauty and the beast” story, a theme that was heavily featured in the previous King Kong films. The director wants to focus more on the island’s legend and the very large creatures that roam throughout the island.

Kong: Skull Island is one of the many films that will be featured at Warner Bros. presentation at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Vogt-Roberts will be in attendance along with Hiddleston, whose last appearance at Comic-Con caused a frenzy among attendees when he dressed up as Loki, his character in Marvel’s Thor franchise, to promote Thor: The Dark World in 2013.

Larson, Jackson, Goodman, and Reilly will join Vogt-Roberts and Hiddleston at SDCC next week. In the EW interview, Vogt-Roberts dropped hints that people will be amazed at what will be revealed in the film’s movie trailer, although there’s a possibility that a short teaser trailer will be shown at Comic-Con.

Kong: Skull Island has a March 10, 2017 release date.

[Photo by Mark Davis/Getty Images]

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