After his success in winning the Oscar with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, director Peter Jackson rolled straight into one of his longstanding passion projects: directing a remake of King Kong. This 2005 film grossed more than $ 562 million worldwide, which ultimately did not quite enough to justify a straight. But before the notion of a sequel was discarded, one was really in development and Jackson was eyeing a director for the project: Adam Wingard, who eventually directed the Eighth Wonder of the World in this month’s edition Godzilla vs. Kong.
/ Film spoke to Wingard this week before the release of the new film and, although our full interview will be published soon, we wanted to highlight a piece of MonsterVerse history that we had never heard of before. When we asked Wingard about his pitch to ensure direction of jobs Godzilla vs. Kong, he surprised us by saying that he never really needed to make a formal presentation because he had a pre-existing relationship with the producer Mary Parent, who runs Legendary. And it turned out that this relationship started thanks to Peter Jackson and a project that did not work as originally planned.
“I think that, in many ways, the reason for [me not having to do a pitch for Godzilla vs. Kong], we have to go back in time until 2013, when You’re next it was about to come out in theaters, ”explained Wingard, referring to his excellent horror film. “Somehow, Peter Jackson saw an early version of You’re next, and he was interested in me directing a sequence of his King Kong movie. I was going to be called Skull Island. Simon Barrett was going to write. Mary Parent, who now directs Legendary and produced this film, agreed with that. But this film was created at Universal, and the rights to King Kong somehow ended up at Warner Bros. This movie went the wrong way, and so did I. in Mary Parent’s mind. “
Previously, we knew that the studio wanted Joe Cornish as a possible director for Skull Island, and Jackson was at least open to the idea of Guillermo del Toro addressing that, too. But Wingard’s name was never mentioned at that time, and it is a fascinating scenario of hypotheses to imagine how things could have happened if he had received the keys from Kong at that time. Jordan Vogt-Roberts ended up directing the 2017 film Kong: Skull Island, which looks like it could have evolved from the original idea of the Jackson sequence to what it eventually became. and years later, Wingard finally had a chance to tell a story in that arena as well.
Godzilla vs. Kong arrives at HBO Max and US theaters in March 31, 2021.
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