Remaking King Kong in 2005 was Jackson’s next big film after the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But back in the mid-1990s, he tried to revive the gigantic gorilla franchise. Plus, the final product would have been drastically different from that alternate. Taking cues from the playful, swashbuckling adventure The Mummy in terms of tone.
King Kong 1976
Now that we’ve established that King Kong 96 almost happened let’s examine the reasons behind its cancellation. Michael Eisner had the idea to recreate King Kong for modern audiences in the early 1970s while watching the original on TV. This was long before he headed Disney. He would approach Paramount with the pitch, but he would also bring it up with Universal Pictures’ then-CEO and president, Sid Sheinberg.
He let his guard down, and now two film studios are vying to replicate the same picture. In the midst of their legal battle, Universal agreed to hold off on releasing their remake until at least 18 months after Paramount’s, which they did in 1976.
Peter Jackson’s King Kong 2005
Twenty years later, while filming Peter Jackson’s The Final Countdown, Universal saw some promising footage and approached the up-and-coming director, asking if he would like to direct one of two horror films that they were planning to remake. None of them piqued Jackson’s curiosity, starting with The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
However, King Kong was the second. In addition to being Jackson’s favorite film, King Kong was the one that pushed him over the edge to pursue a career in filmmaking. When he watched Kong fall from the Empire State Building for the first time at the age of nine, he was so moved that he cried. He tried to recreate the footage with his parents’ Super 8 camera a few years down the road after constructing a Kong wireframe model out of rubber and his mom’s fur coat.
Inspired by the stop-motion work in King Kong, Jackson initially intended to work in special effects before becoming a director. Weta Digital, King Kong’s revolutionary visual effects business, was founded in part by his passion and obsession with special effects, so today, we can thank him for more than just providing us with Peter Jackson, the director.
Despite Universal’s invitation to helm King Kong, the unexpectedly reluctant Jackson declined. He argued that Weinstein and Miramax should buy the rights to adapt The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings into films. It took longer than expected for Weinstein to complete the project, and Jackson was getting worried that Universal would probably bring in someone else to helm Kong, who might not do a good job. Eventually, Jackson changed his mind and agreed to direct the film.
The situation would infuriate Weinstein, so Jackson came up with a plan to appease him. His company, Wingnut Pictures, would co-finance the film with Universal and Miramax, and Jackson would retain complete creative control. The three companies would split the profits.
Despite the fact that the arrangement benefited Jackson—an aspiring filmmaker who had not yet scored a major hit—Weinstein would approve of it. Weinstein was known as Harvey Scissorhands for his habit of recutting his filmmakers’ pictures, so the idea that Jackson would receive the final cut on a picture of this size was considered a major victory for him.
The Mummy
So, how would King Kong have changed if it had been made in 1996? To start with, the film’s tone would have been totally different. The original 1996 version would have been a lighter, more lighthearted, swashbuckling adventure, comparable to Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy, in contrast to the 2005 remake, which was serious, solemn, and occasionally dark.
Take the opening scene of the film as an example. Instead of being a screenwriter like in the 2005 version, Jack Driscoll would have been an American fighter pilot. They would have been playing baseball in the sky above France during World War I in their biplanes. As the two men engage in a game of ball-throwing and bouncing off each other from their planes, they are ambushed by a group of German fighters led by the Red Baron. The Red Baron opens fire on Jack and his companion, bringing down both planes and killing Jack’s friend. The ordeal leaves Jack so traumatized that he never wants to fly again.
Sumatra
As the story continues, we will travel to Sumatra in 1933, where Jack and his logging business were hired to remove 100,000 acres of rainforest. Anne Darrow, unlike in the 2005 remake, is not a struggling actress but rather the daughter of renowned English archaeologist Lord Linwood Darrow, who is on the scene at an archeological excavation.
Jack and Rick represent the American swashbuckling adventure type of contrasting Evelyn, and Anne’s more elegant English cerebral personas, and their love-hate relationship with Anne, in the end, is similar to Rick O’Connell and Evelyn Carnahan in The Mummy. Also filming a documentary about the indigenous people of Sumatra is exotic filmmaker Carl Denham, who plays a somewhat more prominent role in this version of the character.
King Kong’s Skull Island
Antagonist compared to the 2005 remake, which drew inspiration from Orson Welles and John Huston for the role. The crew finds an old temple as Denim films the excavation. A gigantic ape sculpture and a map to Skull Island are housed within. When the local military finds out they don’t have a permit, they try to shut them down.
As the others are driven from the island, Lord Darrow meets his end in the resulting mayhem. Jack and Anne take a seaplane to catch up to Denham, who is leading a film crew on a boat toward Skull Island in search of a prehistoric people he believes he can film there. Jack is tearing across the water’s surface, reluctant to go any lower, while Anne is hell-bent on finding anything new on the island when they get there.
After everyone reaches Skull Island, a lot of things happen, just like in the 2005 remake. The kidnappers plan to sacrifice Anne. Kong has dragged you off into the woods. The group avoids raptors and triceratops, and there are plenty of dinosaurs in this version, including the Brontosaurus Stampede and Kong’s battle with three T-Rex. Denim makes a less-than-subtle reference to Jurassic Park by saying that this island would be perfect for a dinosaur theme park.
Spider Pit Scene
Written so soon after Jurassic Park—and with some of the deleted sequences still in there—it’s obvious that both had a significant impact. Sequences, such as the spider pit scene from the original 1933 King Kong that Jackson aimed to revive. Supposedly, this sequence horrified and unsettled viewers during the film’s initial showing in 1933 to the point that RKO decided to cut it out, even though Marion C.
The reason it was eliminated, according to Cooper, was because it ended the plot. Even if it doesn’t appear that scary now, I can only imagine how people reacted when they watched the chest-burster scene in Alien for the first time. That moment also supposedly caused many to rush out of the theater screaming The sequence would unfortunately pass into folklore and be lost to history unless Jackson included an updated version in his remake and used stop-motion animation to recreate it in black and white.
Nevertheless, Jackson astutely included a crucial story point in the scene, rendering it nearly impossible to eliminate, out of concern that it might meet the same fate as the original in the remake. The moment Denim’s camera broke, he realized his fame and fortune weren’t in making a film about King Kong but in curating an exhibition displaying the ape. This epiphany inspired Denim to capture the ape and return him home alive.
But the story starts to veer off course as the characters return Kong to New York, just like the 2005 version. Ann storms in, furious, to attempt to end the performance, and Denim pokes and prods Kong with a spear as he is shown to the crowd in shackles, hoping for a reaction. In the midst of her violent removal, Kong loses control, frees himself from her bonds, and crushes Denim to death with his stomp.
Afterward, when Kong has climbed the Empire State Building, Jack takes control of a dilapidated plane and tries to shield Kong from the Navy biplanes that are attacking him. Which did, in fact, make it into the 2005 film’s video game version. An elderly woman says the now-famous phrase about Beauty slaying the Beast after Kong’s death.
The Cast of King Kong
Jackson also wanted Fay Wray to make a cameo appearance so she could play this woman. However, she consistently rejected him. Nevertheless, Jackson re-asked her in 2005, when production on the film finally wrapped. In response, she said, “Never say never”. She would tragically die just one month before filming would begin. After working with Kate Winslet on his 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, Jackson was keen on casting her as Ann Darrow and even paid her a visit on the Titanic set to discuss the character.
Robert De Niro was the lead actor that Jackson wanted for Carl Denham’s picture. Jackson reportedly wanted a rising star like George Clooney or Bruce Campbell to play the role of the renegade Jack Driscoll. It was believed that the artists at Weta Workshop lacked experience, so they brought on Bernie Wrightson, a comic book artist known for co-creating The Swamp Thing and for creating an illustrated edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel, to help design Kong and the other creatures on Skull Island.
In an effort to break away from Jurassic Park, Jackson sought to give the dinosaurs a different appearance. Park and pay homage to the style of the original King Kong monsters. Based on his imagination, Jackson imagined dinosaurs and how they could have looked if they had evolved on Skull Island alone, 65 million years ago, rather than how paleontologists had imagined them.
In an attempt to replicate the T-Rex’s appearance, Jackson gave the T Rexes crocodile skin and scales. As a token of his appreciation for being asked to direct the picture, Jackson had a sculpture of Kong’s battle with the T-Rex made in the original script. He was going to give it to Universal, but he ended up asking for it back when the film was canceled, so now it hangs in the lobby of Weta Workshop.
The classic appearance of the original Brontosaurus from one million years ago served as inspiration for the design team’s take on the reptile. A decade later, when filming began, Jackson erred in advising the crew to digitalize the Brontosaur model from 1996 instead of the more contemporary T. rex models used for the 2005 film, which lacked the necessary level of detail.
Because of this, the team had to digitally add a lot more information to it, which was far more labor-intensive than starting the model from the beginning. Jackson had a vision of a serene, regal beast in his prime when he first imagined Kong. But before pre-production was eventually shut down, the crew never finished his look.
In the 2005 remake, Jackson wanted him to be a terrifying, weathered beast who lived alone in the jungle, so he decided to take a totally different approach. An albino gorilla named Snowflake in a Spanish zoo would serve as an inspiration to him; she resembled an elderly guy who had seen better days, with a more wrinkled face than the average gorilla.
King Kong in New York City
A pug named Monster with a crooked mouth and snaggle tooth would wander around the workshop, and the team would take further ideas from him to incorporate into Kong. The film’s visual effects, like those in Jurassic Park, would have been a hybrid of computer-generated imagery and practical effects; for example, close-up images of King Kong would have used practical effects to make him look more lifelike.
The use of a mechanical hand when holding Anne or a performer in a costume when stomping through woods is two examples. Additionally, Weta created an online recreation of New York City in the year 1933. As an illustration of the advancements in visual effects, the Empire State Building segment in the film was previsualized in 2005 using the 1996 CGI build of New York, but the detail and resolution were deemed inadequate by early 2007.
Compositing planes flying about downtown Wellington for the dogfight was another great feat for the crew, especially considering it was 1996. Whatever happened, then? What led to the project’s cancellation, anyway? Universal shelved the Kong project when they found out that Godzilla and Mighty Joe Young were due to hit theaters before Kong. They were worried that moviegoers would be sick of large monster movies by the time Kong came out.
Suddenly, Jackson and his crew would shift their focus to adapting the Lord of the Rings film. Universal approached Jackson following the first film’s commercial and critical success, inquiring about the possibility of his directing King Kong when he completed the trilogy. During the post-production of Return of the King, Jackson reached an agreement with Universal and recruited Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote the scripts for Lord of the Rings with him and Fran Walsh, to assist in rewriting the script for Kong. Jackson expressed his dissatisfaction with the initial 1996 version of the script, stating,
Hollywood screenplay of the silliest kind. Perhaps it was for the best that James Cameron’s Spider-Man and Godzilla 94, along with King Kong 96 and other ambitious, effects-heavy, never-made projects from the 1990s, never materialized. These films would have significantly pushed the boundaries of what was achievable back then.
But even if they had all worked together, technology would still be miles ahead of where it is now. Since they were all quite innovative for their time, their special effects may not have held up well when viewed by modern viewers. On top of that, if the 1996 version had been made, we would have lost Andy Cir’s very remarkable and tragic performance as Kong, which he would have later reprised with motion capture.
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