'Kong: Skull Island' Cast: New Movie's Ape Returns To 1933 Look, First King Kong Pic Released

For all its flaws, Peter Jackson’s King Kong really nailed the sympathetic aspect of the big ape story. The last of his kind, torn from his home on Skull Island, King Kong was dragged to a city he couldn’t possibly comprehend and killed by his tormentors for having the audacity to escape. Jackson’s Kong looked very much like a giant gorilla (unlike the original King Kong), with all the simian empathy, expressive eyes and gentle, herbivorous behavior we’ve come to associate with our biological family members.

The new King Kong movie, Kong: Skull Island is taking a much more monster movie approach, with a Kong that looks much more vicious and much more like the original 1933 stop-motion ape model. Entertainment Weekly has the first pic of the new King Kong:

Kong: Skull Island is not a remake, for once. Instead it will send Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman to Kong’s island in the 1970s. The trailer for Kong: Skull Island suggests a much different story, with more a military focus and Godzilla feel (setting up the combatants for King Kong vs. Godzilla).

Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts described to EW how he hopes the new King Kong design will be powerful, iconic and reminiscent of the 1933 original:

“With Kong, there’s been obviously so many different versions of him in the past and ours needed to feel unique to our film. I had a mandate that I wanted a kid to be able to doodle him on the back of a piece of homework and for his shapes to be simple and hopefully iconic enough that, like, a third grader could draw that shape and you would know what it is… We sort of went back to the 1933 version in the sense that he’s a bipedal creature that walks in an upright position, as opposed to the anthropomorphic, anatomically correct silverback gorilla that walks on all fours. Our Kong was intended to say, like, this isn’t just a big gorilla or a big monkey. This is something that is its own species.”

Here’s the original Kong:

It looks like they did a great job! Kong: Skull Island will be out in theaters on March 10, 2017.