No, I’m not talking about the third novel in J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic Lord of the Rings trilogy, or even Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of it, I’m talking about another monarch of the silver screen that Jackson has a history with—the Eighth Wonder of the World: King Kong!
Today is the Netflix debut of their new animated series, Kong: King of the Apes, which attempts to revive the classic movie monster for an all-new generation of young horror fans. Set in the year 2050, it finds Kong on the run from an evil mastermind who commands an army of giant, laser-beam-firing robot dinosaurs. Let the binge-watching begin!
Does this mean King Kong will become the Next Big Thing? Who knows. But considering there’s Kong: Skull Island—a big-budget film starring Tom Hiddleston (Crimson Peaks, High Rise), Academy Award winner Brie Larson (Room), Samuel L. Jackson (Marvel’s The Avengers), and John Goodman (10 Cloverfield Lane)—coming out from Legendary Pictures in March 2017, which in turn will lead to the already announced crossover film, 2020’s Godzilla vs. Kong, there’s a chance that movie audiences will want to give Kong another chance, and finally put to rest memories of that bad Peter Jackson remake from 2005.
But, you ask, why am I doing all this talking about King Kong on the SWC blog? Well, it must be because we’ve got something planned for Kong ourselves, wouldn’t you think? And you’d be absolutely right!
Coming from StarWarp Concepts in January 2017 is King Kong, a reprint of the 1932 novelization of the original motion picture and the latest addition to our Illustrated Classics line of books, joining J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, and the Brothers Grimm’s Snow White. Written by Delos W. Lovelace, based on the story by Edgar Wallace and Merian C. Cooper, the SWC edition will feature brand-new illustrations by pulp-comics artist Kevin Tuma (Tales of the Green Hornet, The Twilight Avenger), the novelization expands on the world inhabited by this famous monster of filmland and includes scenes that didn’t appear in the movie’s final cut. The most notorious of those is the terrifying “spider pit” sequence, in which a group of sailors in pursuit of Kong falls into a chasm infested with giant, man-eating arachnids. (Peter Jackson’s remake includes this scene, with outright nightmare-inducing results.)
More details to follow as we get closer to the book’s release—which, by the way, is just two short months before Kong: Skull Island hits movie theaters. Why, you’d almost think we’d planned that intentionally…
