One of the biggest surprise announcements of Comic-Con 2014, the King King spin-off Skull Island, just keeps on surprising us. Nearly two months after the directing duties had supposedly been handed to Attack the Block director Joe Cornish, Universal Studios just announced (via Coming Soon) that they’re giving the reins to none other than Jordan Vogt-Roberts, a filmmaker best known for the Sundance comedy Kings of Summer, about a trio of adolescent boys who build an awesome fort in the woods and decide to live there. It was just okay.
Related: What Do We Want from ‘Skull Island’?
What’s more, Universal Pictures has cast Avengers star Tom Hiddleston to headline Skull Island, a film that aims to stay on the fabled island of monsters from which King Kong hailed in the original 1933 adventure classic and Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake. Tom Hiddleston is a busy actor these days: he’s set to play Hank Williams in the upcoming 2015 biopic I Saw the Light, play the creepy husband in Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming horror film Crimson Peak and and one of the residents of an ill-fated apartment complex in High-Rise, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard.
Details about Skull Island are scarce – we’re still not sure if it’s even officially a prequel or not (perhaps it’s about the fellows who came back with the map we saw in King Kong?) – but Hiddleston is a charismatic presence and Jordan Vogt-Roberts… well, he must have had one hell of a pitch for Universal to give him one of their most anticipated upcoming projects. Let’s just hope for the best.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
