Movies
‘Kong: King Of Skull Island’ Becomes Animated Feature At Fox
Back in 2009, Kong: King Of Skull Island was optioned by Spirit Entertainment with the intent of producing a motion-capture (possibly 3-D) film. Based on a novel that came out around the same time as Peter Jackson’s remake, the story focused on the backstory of Skull Island and how the giant gorilla became king there, introducing other giant gorillas and dinosaurs only hinted at in the previous films.
Deadline reports that Fox has recently picked up the project and plans to turn it into an animated feature that is a modern-day take on the King Kong story told from the ape’s perspective. Christian Magalhaes and Bob Snow, whose ‘Murder of a Cat’ script made the Black List, have been hired to pen the tale. This sounds a little too ambitious to be DTV, but I can’t really say whether or not general audiences are salivating for more giant ape adventures, especially when the last two attempts to bring the story to the big screen failed to set the world on fire – I love Jackson’s version, though.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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