Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures have released the first official image from Kong: Skull Island. The image shows lead actors Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson in front of a very large skull.
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“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,” director Jordan Vogt-Roberts tells Entertainment Weekly. “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.
“In terms of actual size, our Kong is by far the biggest Kong,” he continued. “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.”
Vogt-Roberts says the size of the titular ape is tied to themes of the film. “The film takes place in the ’70s,” he says. “The ’70s was a time where it was believable that we could still be confronted with myth. And there was still unknown in the world.” A NASA satellite ends up finding Skull Island out there in the unknown.
In the film, Hiddleston is an ex-British SAS track and Larson is a war photographer. Vogt-Roberts won’t say what they find on Skull Island, but he insists that they won’t be repeating the narrative of past King Kong movies.
“We’re very explicitly not telling the beauty and the beast story,” he says. “The original is a classic, the ’70s version is great for what it is, and Peter’s version is a great retelling of the 1933 film.
“The thing that most interested me was, how big do you need to make [Kong], so that when someone lands on this island and doesn’t believe in the idea of myth, the idea of wonder – when we live in a world of social and civil unrest, and everything is crumbling around us, and technology and facts are taking over – how big does this creature need to be, so that when you stand on the ground and you look up at it, the only thing that can go through your mind is: ‘That’s a god.’”
Kong: Skull Island will be released in theaters March 10, 2017.
