Universal has set a new record by agreeing to pay Peter Jackson $20 million against 20 percent of the gross for the KING KONG remake he?s currently developing at the studio. Jackson will share the fee with his KONG/LORD OF THE RINGS co-scripters, Fran Walsh (who?s also co-producing KONG with the director) and Philippa Boyens. Many filmmakers have taken home multimillions for helming big-ticket epics, but it?s rare for one to be guaranteed such a huge advance?though given Jackson?s huge success with the RINGS trilogy, it?s a pretty safe bet his final compensation will exceed the $20 mil. KONG, which will shoot in New Zealand, has already been slotted for a December 14, 2005 release.
And so another classic story gets dramatically bollixed. Oi! Jackson! NO! Leave the greatest monster movie ever made ALONE! You're a fat, overrated fuck and there should be a law against people like you updating golden nuggets of cinema at your own whim, willy nilly.
But if you DO do it, it had better have dinosaurs in it- and it had better not be a misjudged 'eco-fiasco' like the last one.
Steev
President of the 'Peter Jackson smells' club.
He must have something pretty different planned for the film since it was it's already been remade - can't see another retelling with a big CGI ape being a big splash without some new monsters etc.
Personally I never understood why the 70s version went down so badly - the casting could be better though the effects look pretty good, certainly for their time, and the story and message is intact, impossible as it is to match the original. Why though do the natives on the island build a giant-monkey-sized door into the walls of their villiage?
ADE
ADE
Ugh. Kong.
Well, I have a fondness for the movie, though I'd enjoy it much more if it never got out of the Jungles, the land special effects forgot. The jungle stuff is genuinely exciting, who cares if Kong can't use the tube system? There you go, I'd scrap the bit everyone remembers, no wonder I didn't get the job.
Remakes... well, I'm very dissapointed, I was hoping Jackson would now go lo-budget. But if this gives him hods of cash to do his own thing in future, then fair enough.
Surely it'll be fine enough so it will, so it will.
Kong (1933 version) is my all time favourite movie, in fact I have recently written my final disatation on the movie and its effects on the genre that followed it.
Jacksons plan as far as I am aware is to remake the 33' version rather than an all new version or the dreadful 77 version with Bridges and Lange. Jackson hopes to remain faithful to the original, a movie that influenced him greatly as a child, and in interviews in Screen, Esquire and GQ he has stated that if he could, he would do a shot for shot remake in black and white.
I have every faith that Jackson will do the movie good and that if he handles it half as well as he did with the Rings movies it will be one of the best movies ever made.
Just my own opinion :)
Marc
four words for you:
Planet Of The Apes.
uggh.
My mate to a leak next to him in a lav, and yes he dose honk...aledgedly.
*shudders*
I know shot for shot remakes dont work, just take a look at that god awful remake of Psycho! Hitchcock isnt just turning in his grave the poor bugger span out of it!
Sorry if it sounded like a rant, it wasn't but I loves Kong very much and really do want to see the movie done justice. Then again I love Dredd very much and well to answer that question just watch Sky One from 9pm tonight.
Marc
Heh, Jackson for Dredd!
No, if anyone can do a good job of King Kong it's Jackson I suspect.
He's already done a miniature version, kind of, with the cave troll scene in Fellowship.
Although i'd have preffered the rotund, bearded one to have made Braindead 2, I think he''ll do a fine job of Kong.
I want Bad Taste 2 Rest of the Universe O.
Just a shame Garth Ennis never got to do that Bad Taste comics adaptation in 2000 AD like he always wanted.
davidbishop
"Heh, Jackson for Dredd!"
Y'know,that would be lush.He is a talented and dedicated film maker IMHO and it's the kind of thing you couldnt see him doing,which is why it'd be great.
I don't give,ahem,two monkeys about Kong.Who cares about an big rampaging simian??
M.
I'm looking forward to this already. I think it will fucking rock!
Come one people, it will be great!
it certainly should be good considering the directors love of the subject material.
And his bags of talent!
Blimey, you'd think so! Love for a subject and bags of talent have never been guarantees for a corking film, sadly. Been down that road before with John Carpenter.
I can't see the point of remaking Kong unless it really gets to grips with all the stuff Cooper, O'Brien etc wanted but could never achieve in their day. Even so, a remake could never hope to achieve the same level of movie magic. Fingers crossed anyway.
Read the draft script for this a while back. It's very faithful to the original, packs in action and gore (LOTR style last-second cutaways keep the rating down) and looks to be a kick-ass version of KONG, for my money. Which it will be receiving, oh yes.
J-Bo-1
Thought jackson was meant to be making a lo-budget feature about a (real-life) scientist who took a young boy with a defomred penis and raised him as a girl?
What's the fun of directing huge special-effects blockbusters if you don't get the cash to do the films you REALLY want to do?
Erm is his name Frank.....
Yer "turn it on the wasp factorys head" Slippo
Heh, Wasp Factory. There's another possible film I'm in two minds over whether it should it ever get made.
'Just a shame Garth Ennis never got to do that Bad Taste comics adaptation in 2000 AD like he always wanted.'
...now there is something i'd love to draw!
'I'm born again!'
Jock
Looks like Banks was simply ripping off a real-life story. How disappointing.
From Empire:
So how do you follow the eye-popping grandeur of a three-year labour of love the size of The Lord of the Rings trilogy? Let your ego expand to the size of Jupiter, recklessly go hell for leather at another huge project and land roundly on your arse? Not if you're Peter Jackson, you don't.
Wisely giving himself a break from the Balrogs of this world and putting off his proposed King Kong remake, Jackson is to make a small, true story in the vein of Heavenly Creatures his next project. His writer and producer on LOTR, Fran Walsh has revealed that one such candidate is the true tale As Nature Made Him about a New Zealand doctor who thought he'd found the perfect subject to test his theory that gender can be assigned to newborns. The medicine man switched the gender of an eight-month old baby after the child was deformed in a disastrous circumcision mishap. Walsh told Variety, "The boy was remade and raised as a girl, and it's the story of how that experiment ended so disastrously." Any further away from Tolkien you cannot get.
But Jackson's got to wrap up the third and final part of his Middle-Earth masterpiece before concentrating on such smaller movies. Walsh added "Peter's already very much engaged in Return of the King, and I know he's most proud of the last movie."
Link: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?endeca=1&ean=9780060192112&displayonly=RGG
"...now there is something i'd love to draw! "
This is all getting too much! Oi Tharg, make it so!!!
Not on King Kong, but on the subject of remakes, I hope everyone will boycott the travesty that is The Italian Job remake. Bah! No Michael Caine, no Noel Coward, no Benny Hill, NO REAL MINIS!!! And it'll be full of bloody yanks. No place for yanks in the Italian Job, that's what I say :o)
On King Kong, I reckon he'll make a good job of it, you can't obviously top the original, but you can certainly make the world forget about the rubbish remake with it's pervy King Kong trying to pull the woman's top down. Umm, TACKY!
At least he won't be climbing the World Trade Centre this time round.
>>Not on King Kong, but on the subject of remakes, I hope everyone will boycott the travesty that is The Italian Job remake. Bah! No Michael Caine, no Noel Coward, no Benny Hill, NO REAL MINIS!!!
Fair does, mate. No matter how hard the filmmakers could have tried to make the remake resemble the original, creating roles for Coward and Hill might have been a bit difficult, seeing as how they've been dead for years.
Thing is can it be any better than Get Carter, Planet of the Apes, The Vanishing, et al?????
Remakes tend to be awful. The Italian Job (IMHO) wasnt even a great movie to start with, so imagine it in the hands of Warlberg???? I rest my case!
I await King Kong with a cyniscm.... Optomistic cyniscm (Sp)
Yer Slips
>>Remakes tend to be awful.
There are a few honourable exceptions, of course.
Like the 1941 Bogard/Bacall/Houston version of The Maltese Falcon. Who even remembers that the story had already been filmed twice before?
"creating roles for Coward and Hill might have been a bit difficult, seeing as how they've been dead for years"
There is that, yes. I didn't mean they should be in it, just that you can't replace them as characters, and certainly not with americans. But anyway, the main point is that it's just a big advert for the new minis which are crap, completely defying the point of a mini, that is, being small, which the new ones aren't. Horrible crap hatchbacks shaped like minis are what they are.
Thing is too, why remake it? If they're going to change it that much anyway (I believe it's not going to be in Rome anymore), why not just make it a sequel of sorts?