Which King Kong movies are classics, and which should have never left the island?
Here's every King Kong movie ranked worst to best!
With a 0 percent Tomatometer score, King Kong Lives is the worst King Kong movie, and it's also
in the running for "Worst Movie Ever." Released ten years after Dino De Laurentiis' King Kong in
1976, King Kong Lives is the sequel nobody wanted to the remake nobody asked for, with none of the
stars from the first film and a fraction of the budget. Turns out King Kong survived his nearly
2,000-foot fall from atop the World Trade Center, but he needs an artificial heart to survive.
If that isn't bizarre enough, the film also features Kong courting a female Kong.
We can understand that De Laurentiis wanted to make a sequel, albeit ten years after anyone
cared, but was this really the best they could do? King Kong Lives came out 53 years after the
original King Kong, and yet its special effects are less convincing. While King Kong's stop-motion
animation was groundbreaking, King Kong Lives opted for the more primitive filmmaking technique
of putting a man in a gorilla suit. It's little wonder King Kong Lives was a Raspberry
Award nominee for "Worst Special Effects."King Kong Lives bombed with $4.7 million worldwide,
effectively killing off the character for 20 years.
King Kong Lives came out ten years after 1976's King Kong,
an eternity between sequels, but Hollywood didn't always move so slowly.
The original King Kong was released in New York City on March 2, 1933, and its sequel Son of Kong
came out on December 22, 1933. Yep. RKO Pictures wrote, produced, edited, and released a sequel in
nine months. But while you can respect their work ethic, you can't respect the finished product.
Son of Kong is just over 69 minutes long, so it barely even qualifies as a feature film,
and it's so thrown together that it barely qualifies as a movie-going experience.
As for the plot, Carl Denham, the explorer/filmmaker from the original movie,
has been sued into bankruptcy and returns to Skull Island in the hopes of finding treasure
to pay off his debts, but instead, he finds a 25-foot-tall, albino,
baby Kong instead. Son of Kong killed whatever chance Kong had of being a multi-film series.
It was only natural a King Kong remake would arrive in the 1970s,
the same era as The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, and Jaws.
Naturally, the man to bring it to the screen was Dino De Laurentiis. De Laurentiis didn't know the
meaning of the word "small" and assembled a $24 million budget, about $108 million today, to top
Spielberg's killer fish. The production spent $1.7 million alone on a 40-foot-tall Kong animatronic
made with 3.5-tons of aluminum and 1,012 pounds of Argentinian horsetails, but it was barely
even used in the film. The eight-month shoot featured 12-hour days, which tested the resolve
of its stars Jeff Bridges and Charles Grodin, as well as Jessica Lange in her first major part.
"Oh god, I'm tired of thinking."
And since this was the 1970s, they couldn't just make a movie — they also had to make a statement.
Grodin's evil oil exec travels to Kong's island seeking black gold, but he exploits
the famous big gorilla instead. While King Kong mostly relied on the man-in-suit technique that
looked less realistic than its 1933 predecessor, the movie still snagged a Special Achievement
Oscar for Special Effects. King Kong earned $52 million, making it the fourth biggest hit of 1976,
but it was disappointing considering that was just 20 percent of what Jaws earned the year before.
Today, Kong fans rightly view De Laurentiis' King Kong as a monster disappointment.
Following the enormous success of King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962,
RKO allowed Toho Studios to produce a sequel. Toho pitched a script pitting
the mighty ape against a giant lobster, Ebirah, which RKO rejected. RKO now
mandated that Toho co-produce the film with American studio Rankin/Bass, which
was featuring King Kong in a popular Saturday morning cartoon, The King Kong Show. In fact,
there was already a script produced, which was basically a big screen remake of the cartoon.
The result was King Kong Escapes. Toho pulled out all the stops for this film,
assigning its top kaiju director, Ishiro Honda, to the project,
alongside A-list actors Akira Takarada and Mie Hama.
However, King Kong Escapes isn't a sequel to the original Kong or even King Kong vs.
Godzilla. Instead, it exists in its own universe. The film has a lot of plot,
but basically, King Kong rescues an expedition from a dinosaur, is brought back to Tokyo,
and must stop a mad scientist from taking over the world by battling his own mechanical double,
Mechani-Kong. In other words, you should absolutely watch it.
King Kong vs. Godzilla screams no-brainer, but its path to the big screen was anything
but straightforward. The stop-motion genius behind the original King Kong, Willis O'Brien,
wanted to pit Kong against Frankenstein's monster,
but Universal nixed the project. O'Brien's pitch made its way to Toho Studios, but they wanted to
replace Frankenstein's monster with their own creation, Godzilla, who'd been on a seven-year
hiatus. A new script was written without O'Brien's knowledge, and King Kong vs. Godzilla was born.
The film is a landmark sci-fi film that launched the kitschy, colorful spirit
that would define the previously somber Godzilla series. The film was a massive hit in Japan,
and so it was rewritten to feature American actors and distributed in the United States,
where it performed well. Contrary to popular lore, there's no alternate Japanese ending where
Godzilla swims off in victory instead of Kong. However, the original Japanese version is much
different from the American one, and it's really more of a comedic satire. This version was elusive
until Criterion Collection released it in 2019. Whichever version you see, King Kong vs. Godzilla
is a classic of the kaiju genre and one of Kong's most famous cinematic appearances.
Gareth Edwards' Godzilla brought the Big G back to American movie screens in 2014,
defying even the highest expectations when it opened to $93 million and earned $524 million
worldwide on a $160 million budget. Kaiju flicks suddenly meant cash, and Legendary Pictures also
hoped to capitalize on moviegoers' sudden appetite for cinematic crossovers. Inspired by the success
of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the company launched its own series, the MonsterVerse. The
next film in the series would bring back arguably the most famous monster in movies — King Kong.
Kong: Skull Island assembled a stacked cast, but the biggest star was Kong. Skull Island
wasn't a sequel or remake but a reboot, and it ballooned the monster ape's height to 100 feet
and dialed the cinematic spectacle up to 11. It somehow managed to pay homage to Apocalypse Now
and still give audiences what they paid to see — big monsters fighting each other.
Kong: Skull Island received a 75 percent Tomatometer ranking,
and earned $168 million domestically and $566 million worldwide on a $185 million budget,
making it the most successful movie so far in the MonsterVerse. Kong: Skull Island is better than it
had any right to be, with strong performances, a breakneck pace, compelling characters you
love to root for, and enough cinematic monster carnage to create the perfect Saturday matinee.
Nearly 60 years after King Kong vs. Godzilla, the big lizard got his rematch in 2021's Godzilla vs.
Kong. Besides being a much better movie than the original, Godzilla vs. Kong could be more
historically significant, too. That's pretty impressive, considering King Kong vs. Godzilla
was groundbreaking, launching the Toho Godzilla series from a black-and-white, somber affair
into the brightly colored, lighthearted "Godzilla vs. fill-in-the-blank" format we know and love.
However, Godzilla vs. Kong received the widest theater count of the pandemic era
while also being released on streamer HBO Max, which for many analysts signaled the
beginning of a return to "normalcy." You couldn't find a more unlikely candidate.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters underwhelmed during the infamous summer of 2019, casting
the MonsterVerse's future in doubt. Godzilla vs. Kong seemed destined to disappoint ... then the
first trailer dropped and became the fourth most liked trailer ever. In some strange way, Godzilla
vs. Kong became the movie audiences needed. As critic Shirley Li wrote in The Atlantic,
"It's kind of admirable how aggressively Godzilla vs. Kong eschews any grander meaning."
In an era when every big, dumb blockbuster thinks adding "darkness" and "meaning" makes it better,
Godzilla vs. Kong succeeds because it's just a big, dumb blockbuster. Seriously, if you're
looking for epic fights between towering beasts, or if you just really want to see an oversized
gorilla wielding an axe, well, Adam Wingard's action flick is definitely the film for you.
Whatever Godzilla vs. Kong ultimately means for movie history,
it already has become one of the best King Kong movies of all time.
2005's King Kong isn't really a remake so much as it's the biggest example of fan fiction in
cinematic history. As Roger Ebert put it in his four-star review, King Kong was, quote,
"like the flowering of all the possibilities in the original classic film." Director Peter
Jackson loved King Kong ever since he was a kid, and with his newfound creative freedom
coming off The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he sought to bring the big ape back in the
biggest way imaginable. But as with every other King Kong movie, the path was anything but easy.
A pre-LOTR Peter Jackson pitched a King Kong remake to Universal execs in the mid-1990s.
While the studio was on board with his vision,
execs balked when they realized a new Godzilla and Mighty Joe Young were coming out first,
and they feared what might happen if their movie showed up late to the party. A heartbroken Jackson
took refuge in J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork, raising his stock considerably. Jackson eventually
got a Titanic-sized $207 million budget and an epic three-hour runtime. It was a lot,
but after the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Universal figured it was a bargain.
While King Kong received an 84 percent Tomatometer score, its $218 million domestic and $562 million
worldwide box office gross underwhelmed based on its budget. Is it too long? Maybe. But
while Kong's epic length proved too much for many moviegoers, Kong diehards believed Peter
Jackson's love letter to the original couldn't last long enough. After all, the relationship
between the big ape and Naomi Watt's Ann Darrow feels genuinely sweet, and the fantastic sequence
where Kong battles a bunch of dinosaurs is the kind of scene that movies were made for.
King Kong is one of the greatest movies ever. Period. Big-budget genre blockbusters dominate
movies today, and King Kong was first. Only Star Wars comes close to its influence on
special effects, and at nearly 100 years old, King Kong is still the best stop-motion
movie ever. The film is a 100-minute highlight reel of iconic movie moments,
from "the beauty" Fay Wray screaming in terror at "the beast" to the mighty ape
smashing through Skull Island's impenetrable doors to the heartbroken King Kong taking his
last stand atop the Empire State Building. King Kong is truly a triumph of the imagination,
the kind of cinematic spectacle that could only be made in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
"Oh no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast."
But the backstory of King Kong is almost as amazing as the film itself. Globetrotting
adventurer Merian C. Cooper developed projects for RKO Pictures' chief David O. Selznick, and he came
up with the idea of a giant gorilla picture. He was originally going to have a real-life gorilla
fight a Komodo dragon, but when that idea became untenable, he stumbled onto a dinosaur project
called Creation from the stop-motion mastermind behind 1925's The Lost World, Willis O'Brien.
Inspired, Cooper thought, "What if the gorilla fought dinosaurs?" And a masterpiece was born.
King Kong cost $500,000, equivalent to $10 million today, which was a fortune at the time, but it was
worth it. King Kong was a huge hit, and the eighth wonder of the world still inspires awe today.
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