Every King Kong Movie Ranked Worst To Best

The most memorable movie character to emerge from the Golden Age of Hollywood wasn't a conniving Southern belle, a cynical Casablanca bar owner, or even a singing Kansas girl and her little dog, too. It was a gargantuan gorilla with an attraction for blondes. You may not have seen the seven wonders of the world, but you've certainly seen the eighth: King Kong. 

Only Old Hollywood could produce a character so outlandish and yet make him so loveable at the same time. King Kong is fantasy with a capital "F", but the character continues to stand the test of time because he's all too human. Strange as it is to say, we can relate to the big ape. We cheer for him as he goes mano-a-mano (well, primate-a-dinosaur) with a Tyrannosaurus rex trying to chomp down on Fay Wray, and we tear up as he plunges to his demise off the top of the Empire State Building. 

Beauty may have killed the beast, but King Kong's star power has never diminished after nearly a century, and it shows no signs of slowing down. It's rare for a human character to be this beloved for so long but a monster? That's reserved for only a select few. But while all of King Kong's cinematic outings have been memorable, there are some we'd like to forget. Which King Kong movies are classics, and which should have never left the island? Here's every King Kong movie ranked worst to best!

King Kong Lives came out ten years after 1976's King Kong, an eternity between sequels, but Hollywood didn't always move so slowly. Nowadays, the sweet spot is about a two to three year gap between films. Any shorter and you risk overcrowding the marketplace. Any longer and your audience may move on. Well, in Old Hollywood there was no such concern, as the only philosophy was "strike while the iron is hot!" 

So while King Kong was released in New York City on March 2, 1933, its sequel Son of Kong came out on December 22, 1933. Yep, RKO Pictures wrote, produced, edited, and released a sequel in nine months! You're lucky to have a first draft of your screenplay done in nine months these days. Gotta' admire that efficiency. But while you can respect their work ethic, you can't respect the finished product. 

Son of Kong is just over 69 minutes long, so it barely even qualifies as a feature film, and it's so thrown together that it barely qualifies as a movie-going experience. As for the plot, Carl Denham — the explorer/filmmaker from the original movie — has been sued into bankruptcy and returns to Skull Island in the hopes of finding treasure to pay off his debts, but instead, he finds a 25-foot-tall, albino, baby Kong instead. Son of Kong followed its predecessor's breakthrough success with a totally unnecessary sequel that killed whatever chance Kong had of being a multi-film series, a la the Universal Studios monster films.

Following the enormous success of King Kong vs. Godzilla in 1962, RKO allowed Toho Studios to produce a sequel. Toho pitched a script pitting the mighty ape against a giant lobster, Ebirah, which RKO rejected (Toho kept the story but replaced King Kong with Godzilla and named the film Ebirah: Horror of the Deep). RKO now mandated that Toho co-produce the film with American studio Rankin/Bass, which was featuring King Kong in a popular Saturday morning cartoon, The King Kong Show. In fact, there was already a script produced, which was basically a big screen remake of the cartoon, including the TV show's villain, Dr. Who (no, not the British character Doctor Who that premiered in 1963). 

The result was King Kong Escapes. Toho pulled out all the stops for this film, assigning its top kaiju director, Ishiro Honda, to the project, alongside A-list actors Akira Takarada and Mie Hama, as well as C-List American actors. However, King Kong Escapes isn't a sequel to the original Kong or even King Kong vs. Godzilla. Instead, it exists in its own universe. The film has a lot of plot, but basically, King Kong rescues an expedition from a dinosaur, is brought back to Tokyo, and must stop a mad scientist from taking over the world by battling his own mechanical double, Mechani-Kong. In other words, it's a cross between an American Saturday morning cartoon and a Japanese kaiju movie. In other words, you should absolutely watch it.

Gareth Edward's Godzilla brought the Big G back to American movie screens in 2014, defying even the highest expectations when it opened to $93 million and earned $524 million worldwide on a $160 million budget. Kaiju flicks suddenly meant cash, and Legendary Pictures hoped to capitalize on moviegoer's sudden appetite for cinematic crossovers that was spawned by the Marvel Cinematic Universe and launched their own series, the MonsterVerse. The next film in the series would bring back arguably the most famous monster in movies — King Kong. 

Kong: Skull Island assembled a stacked cast (Tom Hiddleston, Brie Larson, John Goodman, Samuel L. Jackson, John C. Reilly), but the biggest star was Kong. Skull Island wasn't a sequel or remake but a reboot, and it ballooned the monster ape's height to 100 feet and dialed the cinematic spectacle up to 11. It somehow managed to pay homage to Apocalypse Now and still give audiences what they paid to see — big monsters beating the crap out of each other. 

Kong: Skull Island received a 75 percent Tomatometer ranking, and earned $168 million domestically and $566 million worldwide on a $185 million budget, making it the most successful movie so far in the MonsterVerse (and the King Kong series, too). Kong: Skull Island is better than it had any right to be, with strong performances, a breakneck pace, compelling characters you love to root for, and enough cinematic monster carnage to create the perfect Saturday matinee.

King Kong isn't really a remake but the biggest example of fan fiction in cinematic history. As Roger Ebert put it in his four-star review, King Kong was "like the flowering of all the possibilities in the original classic film." Peter Jackson loved King Kong ever since he was a kid, and with his newfound creative freedom from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he sought to bring the big ape back in the biggest way imaginable. But as with every other King Kong movie, the path was anything but easy. 

A pre-LOTR Peter Jackson pitched a King Kong remake to Universal execs in the mid-1990s. While the studio was on board with his vision (a swashbuckling adventure pic similar to The Mummy), execs balked when they realized a new Godzilla and Mighty Joe Young were coming out first, and they feared coming in third. A heartbroken Jackson took refuge in J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork, raising his stock considerably. Jackson eventually got a Titanic-sized $207 million budget ($20 million of which went to his wallet) and an epic three-hour runtime. It was a lot, but after LOTR's success, Universal figured it was a bargain. 

While King Kong received an 84 percent Tomatometer score, its $218 million domestic and $562 million worldwide box office gross underwhelmed based on its budget. It is too long? Maybe. But while Kong's epic length proved too much for many moviegoers, Kong diehards believed Peter Jackson's love letter to the original couldn't last long enough. After all, the relationship between the big ape and Naomi Watt's Ann Darrow feels genuinely sweet, and the fantastic sequence where Kong battles a bunch of dinosaurs is the kind of scene that movies were made for.