Where to watch King Kong (1933)
King Kong is available to stream in GB on Prime Video and BBC iPlayer. It can also be rented or bought from AppleTV and Amazon.
An ambitious filmmaker leads a crew and a young actress to a mysterious island, where they encounter a legendary giant ape and other dangerous creatures. After capturing the ape and bringing it to New York as a spectacle, the filmmakers face the consequences of disturbing a powerful being in an unfamiliar world.
Cast: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Frank Reicher, Victor Wong, James Flavin, Sam Hardy, Noble Johnson, Steve Clemente, Roscoe Ates, Merian C. Cooper, Frances Curry
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Trivia & production notes
- Merian C. Cooper's idea for the film was inspired by his friend W. Douglas Burden's book about Komodo dragons, leading him to conceive a story of a gorilla fighting giant lizards.
- Willis O'Brien created a test reel featuring a fight between King Kong and a Tyrannosaurus Rex as well as Kong shaking men off a log, which were both incorporated into the final film.
- Edgar Wallace was hired to write the screenplay starting in December 1931 but died in February 1932, before completing the full draft.
- Ruth Rose, who had never written a screenplay before, was hired in July to rewrite the majority of the film's dialogue after previous screenwriter James A. Creelman quit.
- RKO purchased the copyright to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World due to concerns about similarities between the novel and King Kong, though the studio later agreed not to associate Doyle's name with the film in promotions.
- Cooper reused the jungle sets from The Most Dangerous Game for King Kong's live-action sequences to save costs.
- The film's opening Arabian proverb was created by Merian C. Cooper himself rather than being sourced from existing literature.
- Cooper initially planned to film in Africa and Komodo Island, but the idea was abandoned because RKO executives deemed it too expensive during the Great Depression.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article King Kong (1933 film), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.
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