When the first teasers for Kong: Skull Island surfaced, fans were shown a Kong that made past iterations of the character look minuscule in comparison. Now the studio has released a first look at the intimidating behemoth, and spoiler alert, he looks a tad angry.
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The first up-close shot of Kong doesn’t just convey the anger of Kong (via EW), but also the viciousness of what he’ll do if he catches you. Those massive teeth aren’t just for Skull Island rib night after all.
Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts took a second to talk about their vision for Kong, and which of the various incarnations they based him on.
“With Kong, there’s been obviously so many different versions of him in the past and ours needed to feel unique to our film. I had a mandate that I wanted a kid to be able to doodle him on the back of a piece of homework and for his shapes to be simple and hopefully iconic enough that, like, a third grader could draw that shape and you would know what it is. A big part of our Kong was I wanted to make something that gave the impression that he was a lonely God, he was a morose figure, lumbering around this island.”
“We sort of went back to the 1933 version in the sense that he’s a bipedal creature that walks in an upright position, as opposed to the anthropomorphic, anatomically correct silverback gorilla that walks on all fours. Our Kong was intended to say, like, this isn’t just a big gorilla or a big monkey. This is something that is its own species. It has its own set of rules, so we can do what we want and we really wanted to pay homage to what came before…and yet do something completely different.”
There’s also a reason that Kong’s fur is a deeper brown as opposed to the black fur of other renditions.
“There’s subtle nods. [The ’33 film] was black and white, so it’s really easy to assume that the fur on the monkey is black, but there’s actually a lot of forums and things that you read and there’s some real poster artwork where Kong’s fur skews more brownish, so we actually pushed his fur in more of a brown as opposed to the traditional black. It really was trying to create this feeling so that when these humans look up at him, they hopefully have a visceral response, saying to themselves, ‘That’s a God, I’m looking at a God.”
You can view the first shot of Kong in the gallery.
Kong: Skull Island hits theaters on March 10, 2017.
