While Peter Jackson's name will forever be synonymous with the live action THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy (the first of which, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, hits theaters this month), it's another genre property that initially sparked the director's interest with fantasy film. His attempt at remaking the property, however, fell victim to the Hollywood black hole known as "development hell."
"We were developing KING KONG and THE LORD OF THE RINGS at the same time and we decided to make KING KONG first," Jackson says. "[Unfortunately,] Universal canned the movie after we worked on it for about six months."
Blaming the project's demise on the need for a lengthy and expensive marketing campaign, the director goes on to explain how the loss to fans of monster movies was a gain for fans of Tolkien.
"[Universal's] DANTE'S PEAK and Fox's VOLCANO had sort of raced to see which was going to release first," he explains. "Universal had poured millions of dollars into DANTE'S PEAK to win that race and KING KONG was looking like it was going to be the third movie in a year when GODZILLA and MIGHTY JOE YOUNG were due to be released. Universal just didn't have the stomach for another race to try and get KONG out before those other two films. So they decided to pull out, but we literally because we had both films sort of there finished KONG one day and THE LORD OF THE RINGS started the next day. We were able to switch over and all of the people that we had hired for KONG because we had some designers and CG people working we were able to immediately switch them on to THE LORD OF THE RINGS."
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