Something big is rustling in the trees over at Disney Plus. A new live-action streaming series about King Kong is in development by Disney Branded Television, with James Wan and Paper Girls creator Stephany Folsom involved.
With the working title King Kong, the upcoming Disney Plus series will be an action-adventure drama that explores the origin of a new giant ape and will take place on the Skull Island of the present day, as reported by Deadline. Writing the script for the show is Folsom, best known for her work at Amazon Prime Video on the critically acclaimed science fiction series Paper Girls and on the upcoming The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Folsom is executive producing the series alongside horror powerhouse Wan (Saw, The Conjuring, Insidious, Furious 7).
The big ape's new series is still in the very early stages of pre-production, but we do know that it is based on the novelization by Joe DeVito. These novels, commissioned by the estate of the original 1933 King Kong director Merian C. Cooper, depict the origin story of King Kong and the history of Skull Island. They provide a wealth of material that the new series could cover, including the original story that has been told so many times, as well as the possibility of both prequels and sequels.
The rights to the King Kong property are a tangled mess as horrifying as the deepest jungles of Skull Island. The original character was created by Merian C. Cooper, who co-directed the classic 1933 film with Ernest B. Schoedsack at RKO Radio Pictures, a prominent film studio at the time. In the nearly 100 years since Cooper designed the Kong character, there have been numerous lawsuits over who owned the rights. Cooper alleged that he owned the character and the film exclusively, but RKO claimed the same. This led to a lawsuit in 1963 over whether RKO was allowed to license the character to Japan for Toho's King Kong vs. Godzilla, a suit that Cooper obviously lost.
Today, the rights to the character have been scattered to the wind, with nearly everyone in California claiming ownership of some part of Kong. Universal, Paramount, the Dino De Laurentiis company (which produced the 1976 King Kong remake), Warner Bros. Discovery (which produced 2017's Kong: Skull Island and are rumored to be adding King Kong to their Multiversus fighting game), and the Merian C. Cooper estate are among the many with Kong under their umbrella. Plus, there's also the public domain.
King Kong is currently in pre-production for Disney Plus.
Source: Deadline