Kong: Skull Island is a thrilling reimagining of King Kong's origins within Warner Bros
and Legendary's MonsterVerse.
And while Skull Island is packed with awesome action scenes and monsters, there are still
a number of fascinating creatures and scenes including alternate endings and post-credits
which didn't make it into the final movie.
Yippee-ki-yay movie lovers, it's Jan here and in this video, I'll be talking about many
of the scenes and rejected concepts we didn't get to see in the final cut of Kong: Skull
Island.
If you haven't seen the movie yet, obviously there are spoilers in this video, so be aware
of that or check out my spoiler-free review of the movie by tapping or clicking here.
Kong: Skull Island has a fantastic opening scene, however, what director Jordan Vogt-Roberts
initially had planned could have been even more spectacular.
In an idea that the director put to the studio, a squad of soldiers arrive on Skull Island
in the middle of World War II, and start fighting each other.
Suddenly, a huge ape appears that heavily resembles King Kong from the 2005 Peter Jackson
movie.
The soldiers shoot the giant gorilla dead, leaving the audience thinking that they just
killed Kong himself.
But then an even larger ape emerges with a roar!
By killing off Jackson's version of Kong in this alternate opening, Vogt-Roberts wanted
to establish the idea that the new movie was going to be very different to previous King
Kong movies.
However, unsurprisingly, the studio was not as keen as the director on kicking the film
off in that way!
Skull Island was also going to feature a number of other creatures and monsters.
The first creatures that were cut from the final movie were a pair of sabretooth tigers
that would have appeared the day after Conrad's team and the Sky Devils military unit landed
on the island.
Two enormous sabretooth tigers were going to enter the camp they'd established, triggering
a soldier to shoot and kill one of them, which would have sent the second tiger berserk,
killing that soldier.
The scene was an alternative way of introducing the idea that the explorers were setting in
motion events that would disrupt a local ecosystem they had no idea about.
Other weird and wonderful creatures cut from the movie include a monster Venus flytrap.
By the way, interestingly, a Venus flytrap monster already appeared in the animated Kong
TV series where it battled and nearly defeated Kong in the episode "Green Fear".
And The Art And Making of Kong: Skull Island has some very cool unused concept art of other
creatures and monsters we never got to see in the final film.
A number of unused designs exist for creatures below the water and others that live on the
land.
Although dinosaurs have featured in previous Kong films such as the 1933 and 2005 movies,
Vogt-Roberts was adamant that dinosaurs shouldn't appear in Kong: Skull Island.
The director said he didn't want to try and rival the Jurassic Park and World movies,
and he wanted his creatures not to feel "too alien-like."
In the end, the closest we got to a dinosaur in the final movie was a triceratops skull.
Director Vogt-Roberts also wanted the indigenous population and where they lived to feel fresh
and different from previous Kong movies.
But before the Iwi village we see in the final movie, two alternative indigenous settlements
were planned.
The first was going to be the Boat City where people lived among boats and other ships that
had washed up on the island.
The second village was going to be known as Kong City and it was planned as a traditional
tribal village that was built into rocks and caverns.
It was a place where the people literally worshipped Kong who would sit like a king
on a throne in front of them.
The concept art for Kong City looks epic and although it didn't make it into the final
movie, there is a nod to the original idea in the stone paintings of the Iwi worshipping
Kong that we see after Conrad and the team meet Marlow.
A different ending to the movie was also considered which would have featured a bigger role for
the Iwi people.
The alternate ending involved a desperate action scene with the team stuck on Marlow's
boat while being attacked by a Skull Crawler.
In the scene, the Skull Crawlers have broken through the wall and the boat ends up trapped
at the dead end of the river.
The only way to escape is for the Iwi villagers to haul the boat up over a rock face and waterfall
and into another river to get them to safety.
The scene was inspired by director Werner Herzog's 1982 film, Fitzcarraldo, about a
rubber baron who plans to use native people to drag a massive steamship over the side
of a mountain in the Amazon Basin.
As well as an alternate ending, there were also alternate post-credits scenes.
In one of them, Conrad and Weaver end up on a boat in the Arctic Ocean together with Brooks.
As they watch the ocean, Godzilla suddenly rises up through the layer of ice.
Although this would have been pretty cool, the idea was rejected as they realised the
scene would have been inconsistent with the timeline set in the 2014 Godzilla movie.
The main story in Kong: Skull Island takes place in the 1970s and in the Godzilla film,
it was reported that Godzilla hadn't appeared since the atomic bomb tests of the 1950s.
Now, I'd love to know what you thought about the deleted scenes and creatures we never
got to see in Kong: Skull Island.
And are there any kaiju you'd love to see appear in a future Kong or Godzilla movie?
Let me know in the comments below.
If you enjoyed this, then do hit that like button, and why not check out some more of
my movie deleted scenes videos here?
Thanks for watching and see you next time!
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!