Godzilla vs. Kong Director Reveals Plans for Scrapped Sequel to 2005’s King Kong

Long before he was signed onto direct the recently released Godzilla vs Kong, filmmaker Adam Wingard almost journeyed to Skull Island even sooner. The director has opened up in recent interviews about this, noting that director Peter Jackson hand-picked him to develop a follow-up to his 2005 remake of King Kong after seeing his movie You’re Next. Speaking Yahoo Entertainment Wingard revealed: “It was just going to be called Skull Island….It was going to be a modern-day kind of thing, very different from what Kong: Skull Island ended up being….So that project went away, and I went away with it.”

Luckily for Wingard, Mary Parent was the Vice Chairman of Worldwide Production for Universal Pictures. at the time and went on to become vice chair of worldwide production at Legendary Entertainment, the company that created the MonsterVerse. It took a few years for Wingard to return to the shores of Skull Island with Godzilla vs Kong, but his passion for the material and getting the Kong character right has apparently been with him for years.

“I remember Mary talking about my pitch for Skull Island, and she seemed to remember thinking it was great,” Wingard told Den of Geek. “I don’t remember it hardly at all. I remember a couple of details. It was modern day. There was some sort of opening scene where characters were in a museum and they’re talking. Then at the end of the scene, it’s revealed that the museum has these giant King Kong bones. He’s like this relic from the past and Skull Island is this sort of myth and nobody knows what happened to it. And somehow these characters are going back there.”

Wingard continues, “I remember there was this whole element of the island being cloaked somehow by some sort of technology. Those are the main things that I can remember. I don’t remember what the plot was going to be about. Simon might remember better. Somebody should ask him at some point, because I’d be curious myself.”

Notably “cloaked somehow by some sort of technology” is something that popped up in a way in Godzilla vs Kong as the opening scene of the movie revealed a Truman Show like container that Monarch has built to house the great ape.

In the end Godzilla vs Kong leaves things in a place for more MonsterVerse movies with Wingard himself saying they could do with even fewer human characters.

Godzilla vs Kong is streaming now on HBO Max.