Who created King Kong? The story of Godzilla’s opponent

By now you have undoubtedly seen in mass Adam Wingard’s successful Godzilla vs Kong, released for rent and digital purchase last May 6 also in Italy, and we want to continue our post-release coverage by quickly retracing the history of the creation of the legendary King of Primates, the first giant cinematic monster of the Seventh Art.

The idea of ​​this King of Primates came to director and screenwriter Merian C. Cooper, when he met the explorer W. Douglas Burden just returned from a trip to the Far East with a magnificent specimen of reptile, the largest ever discovered up to that moment (none other than the Drago on Komodo). He was immediately fascinated by the potential of a film dedicated to an expedition to a remote and unmapped place, in search of a rare and enormous animal specimen.

Thus summoned the brilliant producer David O. Selznick of RKO to convince him to get funding for a project of this type, showing him as the basis for the concept Creation del 1931 (unfinished title) e The Lost World del 1925, both dedicated to prehistory and dinosaurs, to an ancient and ancestral world, predatory and of great cinematic impact, and both shot with the technique of Step One.

After a short presentation of a sequence of the future film initially noto come The Eight Wonder (“The eighth wonder“), Selznick and all the shareholders of RKO together decided to proceed with the project, putting King Kong in the works.

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