King Kong live-action series in the works at Disney+

The King Kong franchise is expanding with a live-action series about the giant's origins. At Disney+, the project is still in its early stages. The show would be a serialised drama that delves into Kong's origins as well as the mysteries surrounding his home, Skull Island. According to Variety, the series will be based on Merian C Cooper's original King Kong as well as new novelisations by artist Joe DeVito produced in collaboration with Cooper's estate.

Stephany Folsom, who created the Amazon television series Paper Girls, will write and executive produce the King Kong show. Atomic Monster's James Wan, Michael Clear, and Rob Hackett will also executive produce, as will World Builder Entertainment's Dannie Festa. The show will be produced by Disney Branded Television.

The 1933 King Kong was a critical and popular success, with groundbreaking special effects for its portrayal of Kong. It was remade twice, once in 1976 (directed by John Guillermin) and once in 2005 (by Peter Jackson). The character's rights are complicated; Legendary films have only used the "Kong" part of the name to refer to the humongous ape.

This is the second live-action show based on iconic movie monsters to be launched on a streaming service. Apple is currently developing a Godzilla and the Titans series, which will star Kurt Russell and his son Wyatt Russell. That series is linked to the Monsterverse films, whereas the King Kong Disney+ show is distinct.

This development was first reported by Deadline.

Even though they didn't have CGI to compare it to, King Kong's special effects looked clunky even to 1933 audiences. They liked it despite the jerkiness of the stop-motion fight scenes and the startling way the main character doubled in size from one scene to the next. When it was released on this day, March 2, 1933, critics acknowledged the film's clumsiness—both mechanically and narratively— but hailed it as a smash hit.

Merian Coldwell Cooper's "conceived" King Kong was not entirely created by enlarging miniatures. Kong is 50 feet tall and 36 feet around the chest. His face is 612 feet wide, with 10-inch teeth and 1-foot-long ears. He has a rubber nose and tennis-ball-sized glass eyes. His furry exterior is composed of 30 bearskins. Six men in his interior were running his 85 motors during his tantrums. Naturally, no such beast would be able to compete with a tyrannosaurus. The majority of Kong's fights were photographed in miniature, some in "stop-motion"—using models whose positions were changed minutely after each exposure, similar to the drawings in an animated cartoon.

Despite being released at an inconvenient time, amid the financial collapse that prompted Franklin Roosevelt to declare an emergency bank holiday, the film accomplished the incredible feat of separating Americans from their money. TIME reported in a feature on the 1976 remake that it made $90,000 in its first four days.