King Kong - Page 3  

I believe the "missing footage" was excised from prints for the 1952 re-release. I was friends with possibly the most obsessed stop-motion collector of the sixties and seventies (he died in the late seventies), and he had a 16mm reel of the missing footage in 1968 or 69. Supposedly someone had access to the footage and struck about eight copies, and Jim got one, and the footage that went into the VHS and later issues of the film came from one of these eight copies. This footage has always looked and sounded different from the rest of the footage. Hopefully this print they found (in England?) will predate the excising of the footage.

hmmm.. don't know.
I don't have a VHS anymore, and never have seen the footage refered to.
I'm speaking of the censored "tooth-picking" and "too-risquee Fay" bits the hype refers to. :)

Kool story..That would be nice :)
Guess we'll know soon enough ... I'm hopin' for the best.

Anyway, I sure don't want to hijack the thread off on a tangent, no matter how parallel. :)

I've seen that footage in TCM broadcasts for years.

No details yet, but this is a link (not yet working) to a story on The Drudge Report tonight:

"MOVIE FIGHT BREAKS OUT OVER 'KING KONG': TOO LONG, BUDGET BALLOONS TO $207 MILLION... "

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/mo...gewanted=print

October 27, 2005
A Big Gorilla Weighs In
By SHARON WAXMAN

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 26 - In hiring Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, to remake the monster classic "King Kong," Universal Pictures took a daring leap, paying him $20 million to direct, produce and be the co-writer of the film.

With seven weeks to go before the movie's release, the risks are becoming clearer. After seeing a version of the film in late September at Mr. Jackson's studio in New Zealand, Universal executives agreed to release "King Kong" at a length of three hours.

The film is substantially longer than Universal had anticipated and presents dual obstacles: the extra length has helped increase the budget by a third, to $207 million, while requiring the studio, owned by General Electric, to reach for the kind of long-term audience interest that made hits out of three-hour movies like "Titanic" and the films in Mr. Jackson's "Rings" trilogy.

Hollywood blockbusters have increasingly relied on big releases that bring in as much as half of their ticket sales on the first weekend. But long films receive far fewer showings per day, and the most successful ones, like "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001) by Mr. Jackson, which took in $315 million at the domestic box office for New Line Cinema, have remained in theaters for well over half a year.

The film industry and Universal could use a big seller. <snip>

- - -

I think this film will need DVD sales to recoup the investment - King Kong has a more limited appeal than LOTR or SW, and it's not the same kind of "epic."

It sounds like PJ has brought us a monsterpiece. Let's hope it's a masterpiece.

At least we won't have to wait until August 2006 for a "Director's Cut Extended Edition" (though I wouldn't be surprised to see one from PJ).

Hmmmmm.
Don't know if I can talk the wife into seeing 3 hours of King Kong. Oh well. Another lonely afternoon in the theater for me then, I guess.

Just tell her the starting time, not the ending time. :D

One disappointing note from the NYTimes story:

Universal lost an opportunity to capitalize on a "Kong" revenue stream when an anticipated deal to release the film on Imax screens in December, at the same time the movie would appear in regular theaters, failed to materialize, and Imax chose to show Warner Brothers' new "Harry Potter" film, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire."

"We think 'King Kong' will be a big movie," Richard L. Gelfond, co-chairman of Imax, said, "but unfortunately we could not agree on deal terms, including the box-office split."

Ms. Snider said Imax could not guarantee space in its theaters at the time of Kong's release, and acknowledged that both the studio and Mr. Jackson were disappointed.

Definitely a piece of bad news. IMAX should run several of these big films alternating times rather than one conversion and then the rest documentaries.

Marc

Sell it as a real love story. :D :D :D

Screen grabs from a clip that was shown on 'Access Hollywood':

http://www.theonering.net/scrapbook/group/1791/range/1

CONTAINS SPOILERS!!

New bits and pieces!!! From Apple's website

It's a fluff piece but boy what A-Grade fluff is that! Woohoo! Can't wait for the final trailer to be unveiled!


fuad

Wowsers ... This is going to be great. For those that thought that it was going to be so bad based on the original trailer, this looks great. Can't wait for 12/14.

Kong is looking much better. I noticed Universal is going to release on DVD "Peter Jackson's Production Diaries" the day before Kong hits theaters. That's a new marketing idea; I'm curious how it will work out for them.

Final trailer is online at Apple's website. Available in HD too! Woohoo!


fuad

Edit - I just looked at the trailer info. The Large version and perhaps the HD version of the trailers have 5.1 audio encoded in AAC using a sampling rate of 44.8 kHz! I guess you can hear it in 5.1 if you have 5.1 speakers connected to your computer!

New trailer looks awesome!

What is the deal with the 'Natives'? Are they witches, cannibals, or just a dirty tribe?


Cant wait for Dec 14th.

HOLY CHRIST!! WoW. Just saw the 1080P trailer and OMG this movie is going to freaking ROCK. Wow, he did it, he really did it.

Well, I think Jack Black looks a bit too young for the part, but the new trailer looks much better than the first one, I'd say, for the most part. Three hours. This will likely be my theater-going experience for the year. Will hope to take the granddaughter, too. I hope it's true movie magic, 'cause I've become a bit jaded by CGI-ful monster movies that no longer "wow" me. If there are too many unbelievable narrow "skin-of-their-teeth" escapes, though, it may wear a bit thin.

Kinda looks like Clint Eastwood on the right, :)

I saw the King Kong trailer before Jarhead last night. I loved it. The crowd loved it. Everybody applauded. I think it's going to be great movie. Kong is the best CGI creature every realized IMHO.

A blurb in the DMN Quick says "the movie's climactic scene of Kong trampling through the urban landscape will have a winter blizzard background."

The new trailer is much better. I didn't care for the first one either. The CGI seems much more polished now..........

Everytime I heard someone make the claim that a movie will finally beat Titanic at the box office I have to laugh. Do people realise just what kind of business Titanic did? It made more and more money after the first weekend. Opening weekend it only made 27 million quite dissapointing for a movie with a budget of 200 million. Lord of the rings couldn't do it and was said by some that it wouldf. None of the Harry potters did it when soime said it would. Now those a franchises that together blow Titanic away but I doubt we will be able to predict the next "titanic". J.H.

"There's a beautiful moment with Kong sitting on top of a mountain, Ann in the palm of his hand, both watching the sunset." Daily Mail review

"Another minor complaint is a syrupy scene that edges to close to a cliched romantic moment." a review on KongisKing.net

Apparently the "real" love is there. Makes me think of Kahn and Boyle as Bride and Frankenstein, wistfully laid back in bed together after doing the nasty, sans cigarettes for PC sensibilities.

Lot of negative thoughts on this thread considering the movie hasn't even opened.

I have the original version on dvd and in the extras you can see how much Peter Jackson loves this film its the reason he got into filmmaking and at age 9 after watching the original he started working on his own stop motion animation and from there his love of film grew ( in that regards he started young as did Spielberg ) There is no better director to helm this remake and the fact he has made a 3 hour long film should tell everyone that character development is part of this film and it isn't just going to be a CGI action fest it will have characters you can care about in it, well rounded and developed characters, if it was a hack job it would be 100 minutes long and the fact the studio has said yes to a 3 hour cut shows how impressed they are with it ( and that does not happen often as studios don't often give directors 3 hour cuts )

Lets stop with the negative stuff until the film actually opens as you can't really tell anything from a trailer, indeed trailers can ruin ones perception of a film as sometimes they cram too much into it and leave out the character development, the trailer is designed to get you into the cinema thus they put plenty of CGI and action in it, i trust Jackson to have made an epic and probably the best film of the year.

I also disagree with the poster who said The Frighteners was a bad movie, for me thats a highly entertaining movie but to each their own and i happen to like that movie, now for a bad Jackson movie well in my opinion Meet the Feebles meets that criteria i think it sucks.

I would ask everyone to go out and buy the original King Kong on dvd ( it has great extra's which are better than 99% of the extra's usually found on dvd)yes its a very old movie but its also highly entertaining and you get caught up in the movie and soon forget about the effects work which is of course dated but i didnt care as it entertained me, the atmosphere in this film puts many of the so called recent "blockbusters" to shame and many of the blockbusters of the last ten years to shame as it has heart and a soul which is missing from the poorly scripted CGI films of today. So give the remake a chance as i think in Jacksons hands it will be a monumental achievement in filmmaking and will not only entertain you it will thrill, excite, and have you crying at the end ( or shedding a lil tear and telling everyone you have something in your eye )

Just my opinions and we'll have to wait to see if the remake is really any good but can it really be any worse than some of the heartless dross Hollywood produces for the summer and xmas audiences year in and year out of late ? I'm optimistic :)

While you're at it, pick up the $6 Alpha Video of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME. A rumor I heard/read is that the DVD was ripped from the Criterion edition - it does look pretty darn good for a low-budget DVD company. This is the movie that was made before Kong and also featured Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong - and whose jungle sets were used for KING KONG. It's based on Richard Connell's short story by the same name: http://eserver.org/fiction/the_most_dangerous_game.html

Well worth the $6. It was co-directed by Schoedsack and Steiner did the music, too.

While you're at it, pick up the $6 Alpha Video of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME.

You must have read my mind. I've been meaning to post your post, down to the last word. I watched it again a few days after getting the Kong boxed set. Great stuff, short and sweet, and Fay is almost as hot as she is in Kong.

And the short story is a great read, one of the all-time great short stories.

First I am excited to see this film, if Peter Jackson could match the hype of The Lord of the Rings than he has my confidence in a re-make of King Kong. also don't limit Jack Blacks abilities to the few films that you may have seen. In his earlier work as a sketch / improv performer, you see the side that has made him so successful.