7. It's Setting Up A Movie That Doesn't Need Set Up - Kong: Skull Island
One of the big surprises of SDCC 2014 was the announcement of Skull Island, another King Kong movie that would ostensibly tell the giant ape's origins before he gets taken to New York and a film director confuses beauty for planes with machine guns (read: the interesting part about Kong). The first King Kong is an absolute masterpiece of early fantasy cinema, with visuals that, while inevitably dated (what do you expect after eighty years has passed?), are still impeccably constructed and a story that's endured to the point it feels like a generation-spanning legend. The film's reputation is so big that the two attempts to remake it - a cheap seventies retread nobody talks about because Kong climbs the World Trade Centre and Peter Jackson's fan-boy love letter that inexplicably ran almost twice as long as the original - never managed to get beyond their complete adoration of it. That's one hurdle Skull Island doesn't look like it'll have to deal with, and that's kinda the problem. The entire purpose of the movie is to build towards Legendary's proposed shared universe of monsters, seeing Godzilla show down with the Eighth Wonder of the World, but do we really need an origin story to get there? As already stated, Kong is legend. If you can throw relative unknown Mothra into Godzilla 2 carte blanche, you can have America's biggest monster this side of Michael Bay turn up without much set-up.
