KONG prequel, WAR EAGLES in development

Hollywood just can't stop flogging King Kong's giant monkey corpse. The original film was so popular that it spawned a host of lesser sequels and remakes, including Son of Kong, King Kong Versus Godzilla, the painfully '70s Dino De Laurentiis version, a '60s animated TV series, and even a 1985 German oddity called King Kong's Faust - the title of which so intrigues me that I can scarcely force myself to finish writing this before I rush off to Netflix myself a copy. One of the Kong rip-offs, 1949's Mighty Joe Young, was so popular in its own right it merited a high-tech, high-concept '90s remake of its own. There have been movies about various overgrown critters on killing sprees, movies about giant bugs, giant lizards and even giant rabbits (Night of the Lepus, featuring an embarrassed-looking DeForest Kelley), but they all stand in the vast shadow cast by Kong.

But in all of the Kong remakes and sequels and parodies and rip-offs, I don't think that anybody has made a prequel - which is kind of amazing, really. Well, now Spirit Pictures is correcting that oversight, with an upcoming motion-capture picture based on the book Kong: King of Skull Island. Joe DeVito and Brad Strickland's novel looks at the early days of Skull Island, a time when young Kong had to battle for supremacy with other giant apes and more dinosaurs. Stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen previously tried to make a film based on the book, but the project bogged down.

But I'm really hooting and ooking in excitement over the news that Spirit is planning a film based on War Eagles, a legendary stillborn project dreamed up by King Kong creator Willis O'Brien. The story is a crazy mess that has vikings riding giant eagles and battling biplanes over 1930s New York, and with a premise like that there's pretty much no way for the film to not be awesome. I'd actually been planning a Neverwas post on the film, and it's an unexpected treat to watch this Neverwas become a Will-be.

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