History of the Cancelled Godzilla vs. Kong Films

 

With Godzilla vs. Kong SO CLOSE (seriously you have no idea how pumped am I for this movie) I thought it'd be fun to tell you the story of not one but two cancelled movies about these two titans going head-to-head again.

Continuation: King Kong vs. Godzilla

Because of the 1962 film, King Kong vs. Godzilla was such a huge success naturally the studio would want to make a sequel. In matter of fact that's pretty much as deep as to why the sequel was being made.

Toho immediately wanted production to start on the next Godzilla movie. And because the 1962 film did great the studio wanted to repeat that success, so Toho decided the next Godzilla movie should be a rematch between the King of the Monsters and King Kong. Screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa submitted a screenplay with the working title of Continuation: King Kong vs. Godzilla back in 1963.

However the studio ultimately cancelled the project and instead replaced that with an idea of Godzilla going up against a giant version of Frankenstein's monster and titled it Frankenstein vs. Godzilla (this story is better saved for another time) but, even that got cancelled and was broken up into two different projects. One being Mothra vs. Godzilla in 1964 and the other being Frankenstein vs. Baragon in 1965.

Godzilla vs. King Kong

The next movie isn't a sequel to the 1962 film but a remake of it. Back in 1989 the movie Godzilla vs. Biollante had a mediocre box office performance, so now Toho felt the absolute need to make the next Godzilla film be as profitable as much as humanly possible. They came up with the idea to look back at their past, in this case they looked at their most successful Godzilla movie which is, that's right, you guessed it King Kong vs. Godzilla. So Toho decided to make a remake of this movie titled Godzilla vs. King Kong. There's not much to know about the plot, the only thing we do know about it was during an interview with designer Shinji Nishikawa. During that interview he revealed that King Kong would've fallen in love with a human scientist, who would later turn him into a cyborg.

So why was this movie never made? Simply put....legal issues. You see during this time Turner Entertainment owned the rights to the original King Kong. Turner later approached Toho and demanded royalties for the use of Kong. But Toho decided they didn't want to pay up and instead tried something else, that something else was to use Mechani-Kong (King Kong's robot counterpart from 1967's King Kong Escapes) but, Toho found out that even using Kong's likeness was rather difficult as well. So instead of continuing this hassle Toho just pulled the plug on the project.

Okay everybody I'm all done here. I hope you enjoyed reading about this just as much as I enjoyed writing it. It's always fun for me to look up movies that could've been but never were. Anyhow, come back on Friday, Apr 2nd for my review of Godzilla vs. Kong. Until then, enjoy the rest of your day.