Corona | Coming Attractions

A story broke in today's Variety about a company looking to make a prequel to King Kong. Written by Joe DeVito and Brad Strickland, Kong: King of Skull Island would tell the untold tale of what the big gorilla's life was like before the S.S. Venture arrived to transport Kong to New York. The book came out at the same time as Peter Jackson's King Kong movie and cashed in on the attention and also attracting the attention of Ray Harryhausen, the famous stop-motion animator who brought to life the fantastic creatures from such films as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Spirit Pictures wants to adapt the novel into a film that would use motion-capture technology to create the look of Kong and the other great beasts on Skull Island.

If you're wondering how Spirit Pictures can make a Kong movie prequel, it's because the rights to Kong were owned by the co-director of the original 1933 film, Merian C. Cooper. Spirit hooked up with Harryhausen, whose name still catches the eye of geeks like me, and it's getting them the attention they need to attract investors.

This isn't the first that I've heard of the project. It's been in development for at least 8 or 9 months and likely longer than that. I've seen the film's makers shopping it at the American Film Market, an annual get-together of film producers looking to attract investors and distributors for their projects.

Andy Briggs is working on a screenplay for King of Skull Island as well as a second project at Spirit called War Eagles. That one is about a World War II fighter pilot that strays off-course, crashlands in the Arctic and is discovered by a lost civilization.