Kong: Skull Island VFX featurette shows how ILM brought Kong to life

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Bringing King Kong back to the big-screen should never be treated as a trivial matter, and thankfully the fine folks at Industrial Light & Magic brought their A-game when it came to realizing the Eighth Wonder of the World for KONG: SKULL ISLAND. As the giant ape received quite the size upgrade for the recent Jordan Vogt-Roberts film, a great amount of attention to detail was needed to bring King Kong to life. ILM has shared a rather cool visual-effects featurette which lays out the amount of work which was put into Kong, including drawing inspiration from real-life gorillas at the San Francisco Zoo as well as detailing all the small elements which make up Kong's matted, dirty coat.

Over seventeen million hairs? That's crazy, especially considering that the average moviegoer isn't even going to notice all the fine details the artists have put in place once Kong is inserted in an environment where he's obscured by fire, water, or smoke. When we next see King Kong in the upcoming GODZILLA VS. KONG, he'll likely look a little different, as director Adam Wingard recently said that Kong will be "more rugged" and "a bit more aged" in the monster mash.

They’re doing Godzilla 2 with Mike Dougherty directing, so our film is in present day. We have a couple characters from Godzilla 2 in ours, but it’ll be interesting to see how Kong has fared over the years. You see him in that film and he’s just constantly under attack. Things are going wrong and there’s probably been lots of human intervention since then. It’ll be interesting to see a more rugged, a bit more aged Kong in this film.

You can check out KONG: SKULL ISLAND for yourself on Blu-ray/4K Ultra HD right now.