One was Creature from the Black Lagoon, which Jackson says he wasn’t interested in, and the other was King Kong. During production, Universal was incredibly impressed with the dailies they were seeing, and approached Jackson about directing one of their classic properties they were hoping to revive. The success of The Frighteners relied on a blend of practical components and visual effects, and Jackson’s passion for this aspect of filmmaking shone through. Fox as an architect with the ability to see and converse with ghosts – an ability he uses for financial gain until a malevolent ghost begins killing innocent people. That led directly to Jackson being hired to make the supernatural horror film The Frighteners for Universal. This is the story of the Peter Jackson King Kong movie we never saw.Īs a filmmaker, Jackson first made waves with his New Zealand creature feature films like Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles, but really gained notice in Hollywood with his 1994 drama Heavenly Creatures - for which he and his partner Fran Walsh were nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. Jackson would immediately move on to Lord of the Rings and get another crack at King Kong in 2005, but this initial version of the monster classic was very different both in tone and story from the lengthy dramatic epic that Jackson would eventually make. A script was written, models were made, but then one day a few months into prep, it all fell apart. Jackson was in the midst of making his first Hollywood movie The Frighteners for Universal Pictures when the studio that owned the rights to King Kong broached the notion of having Jackson tackle a new version. So when Jackson was first asked if he’d be interested in directing an actual remake of King Kong, he couldn’t quite believe it. He even tried to mount his own stop-motion remake as a kid, but only got so far as a few seconds of footage of the climactic Empire State Building finale before he realized he didn’t have the tools (or knowledge) to translate what was in his head to reality. When he was a boy, long before he changed the filmmaking landscape forever with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson was obsessed with the classic monster film.

It’s no secret that Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson’s favorite movie of all time is 1933’s King Kong.

Jack black king kong