“The trouble [with King Kong] is that Jackson, an exuberant director, fresh from his triumph with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, likes to shoot up a storm, and here his exuberance spills over into senselessness,” writes David Denby in his New Yorker review. The Depression background, just a few shots in the original [Kong], is stretched out here with a montage of shantytowns and strikes; the black “natives” in Skull Island — filthy, grotesque and vicious — seem like escapees from a sideshow. In the original, Kong defends his blonde against dinosaurs for just a couple of scenes, but here the fights go on forever. Repeating what Spielberg has already accomplished in the Jurassic Park series, Jackson has fallen into a trap. Spectacle must be more and more astonishing or it creates as much as boredom as wonder, yet it’s not easy, as filmmakers are finding out, to top what others have delivered and stay within a disciplined narrative.”

When I told my 16 year-old son a couple of hours ago that King Kong earned $9.7 million on its opening day (i.e., Wednesday, 12.13), he said, “Really? That sucks!” And the Drudge Report is using the headline “Kong bomb.” It’s not as bad as all that, although it’s certainly disappointing. The $9.7 million Wednesday opening for the most ballyhooed heavyweight spectacle movie of the year (as well as one with a built-in Peter Jackson fan base) is only the 21st highest all-time Wednesday opening. Universal was looking for Kong to earn $80 or $90 million for five days, and now the opening five-day projection is more in the realm of $55 to $65 million. (I’ve been hearing lower and higher projections.) Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia made $65 million last weekend alone, but that film had all those church groups behind it and Kong, I hear, is having trouble attracting women. The Universal view is that (a) “the story won’t be told until after next Sunday…during Xmas week when a Wednesday can be like a Saturday” and (b) “to us it doesn’t portend anything, good or bad.”