The odds may seem lopsided in next year’s Godzilla vs Kong flick, but co-screenwriter Michael Dougherty (director of the just-opening Godzilla: King of the Monsters) says it’ll be a good “David vs. Goliath situation” with Kong becoming the clever, resourceful underdog.
“Because everyone, the moment you say Godzilla’s going to fight Kong, your first reaction is Kong doesn’t stand a chance,” Dougherty recently said. “But if you really take the time to look at Kong as a character, it’s like, okay, in Skull Island he was an adolescent, so he was still growing. So who knows how big he is since the 1970s, when they first met him?”
So the Skull Island Kong was a kid, a sixth-grader, a big-ape version of a 12 or 13 year-old? He was a mid-sized office building, for Chrissake — at least triple the size of Peter Jackson‘s 2005 version, the Dino de Laurentiis Kong of 1976 or the 1933 original from Merian C. Cooper and Willis O’Brien, all of whom were roughly 30 feet tall. (Whereas the light gray Son of Kong beast was only about 15 feet tall.)
Wikipedia says the Skull Island Kong was 104 feet tall. And for the 2020 version he’s going to…what, double that?
I’m not buying the “different Kongs for different folks” rationale. King Kong is a vital, organic element in the psyche of 20th Century America, and you can’t swoop in and super-size him in order to make a profit. Well, you can but you’re the devil. The recent super-sized Kong hybrids come from the minds of greedy phonies, corporatists, non-believers, film-flammers, delusionals. Yes, I’m speaking of Dougherty and his Godzilla vs. Kong co-conspirators (director Adam Wingard, producer Mary Parent, co-screenwriter Terry Rossio).
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