Does the world really need a King Kong TV show? | Little White Lies

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Does the world real­ly need a King Kong TV show?

19 Apr 2017

Words by Eve Watling

Giant gorilla looming over two people, male and female, against a dark background.
Giant gorilla looming over two people, male and female, against a dark background.
The giant movie ape is set for a return to the small screen.

Mar­Vista Enter­tain­ment and IM Glob­al are join­ing forces on a series which will com­bine King Kong’s lat­est out­ing with the great movie ape’s first appear­ance in Mer­ian C Cooper’s King Kong from 1933. King Kong: Skull Island will be a seri­alised live action reboot, explor­ing Skull Island and its mys­te­ri­ous origins.

This announce­ment comes hot on the heels of Kong: Skull Island, which has grossed more than $500m since its release in March 2017, as well as the 2016 Net­flix ani­mat­ed series Kong: King of the Apes. Anoth­er big-screen fran­chise instal­ment, Godzil­la vs Kong, is due to arrive in cin­e­mas in 2020.

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Even in this gold­en age for block­buster fran­chis­es, such reliance on the octo­ge­nar­i­an ape seems exces­sive. So what does this new adap­tion promise, exactly?

Accord­ing to the Hol­ly­wood Reporter, the show will fea­ture a female lead and mul­ti­cul­tur­al ensem­ble. This comes as a wel­come change, espe­cial­ly giv­en that the female char­ac­ters in Kong films are rarely giv­en much else to do besides shrieking.

By cast­ing Brie Lar­son as a pho­to­jour­nal­ist with her own per­son­al mis­sion, Kong: Skull Island attempt­ed to put a more pro­gres­sive spin on the fran­chise but ulti­mate­ly failed to con­vince.

King Kong is one of the most famous film char­ac­ters of all time, spawn­ing a mass of spin-offs rang­ing from the clas­sic to the ter­ri­ble. Whether they cast Kong as a ram­pag­ing beast or a trag­ic anti-hero, each new twist on the sto­ry has tend­ed to reflect the cre­ative atti­tudes of the time.

Let’s hope that this new series proves to be a pos­i­tive exam­ple of mod­ern TV pro­gram­ming, rather than an unimag­i­na­tive cash-grab.

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