‘Kong: Skull Island’ Almost Had Amazing Opening Scene and Post-Credits Scene

Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island (read our review here) is sitting pretty atop the box office charts after an impressive $61 million opening weekend. Thus far fans have generally responded to the pic in favorable fashion. What some might not know though, is that Kong: Skull Island was almost a lot cooler than it already is.

According to Vogt-Roberts, who sat down for a chat with Empire, there was an awesome opening scene and kick ass post-credit scene that ended up on the cutting room floor. And by the sounds of it, we really missed something special (here’s hoping the eventual Blu-ray release will feature both scenes).

Here’s the skinny on the opening shot:

The alternate opening that I pitched to them, the studio said: ‘No. You’re crazy. You can’t do that.’ So it’s World War II. A full squad comes to this beach. They’re killing each other – and then suddenly, this giant monkey (that looks a lot like the monkey from the last King Kong movie) comes out of the jungle. And they just kill it. It’s dead. And you’re sitting there going, ‘wait, did they just kill King Kong? Did they kill the hero of this film?’

And then you’d hear a roar and see a much bigger creature – the real King Kong. That was the crazy version of me wanting to send a message that this isn’t like other King Kong movies that you’ve seen. The studio were like: ‘you can’t do that.’

Now if you think that sounds cool, check out what Vogt-Roberts revealed about the post-credits scene:

We had a bunch of different variations for that. There was one version of that scene where [Tom Hiddleston’s character] Conrad and [Brie Larson’s character] Weaver were on a boat in the Arctic ocean with [Corey Hawkins’ character] Brooks. Conrad and Vernon say ‘what are we waiting for?’, and Brooks is like ‘hold on, hold on…’ – and then Godzilla surfaces and breaks through the ice.

But then we realized that doesn’t really jive with Godzilla, because in Godzilla, they say he hasn’t really surfaced since the atomic bomb tests. So it became this much more stripped down scene. The response to it has shocked me a little bit. It seems to be very evocative.

Now that sounds absurdly cool!

Kong: Skull Island is currently in theaters, and we’re recommending you give it a look!