The 'Kong: Skull Island' Japanese Poster Is Amazing

I hope someone has bought the marketing team working on Kong: Skull Island a nice fruit basket or a bottle of champagne because their work has been so weird and so wonderful. Those trailers are nothing short of nutty and the most recent poster deliberately riffed on Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, with King Kong standing in for Marlon Brando. Someone had to say "Hey, that sounds crazy enough to work" and that person deserves a big ol' hug.

And the Kong: Skull Island art game continues to be on point with the wild new Japanese poster, which looks like it was produced in the '60s and transmitted to 2017 by a time machine.

The poster is very much a throwback, utilizing hand-drawn art, bright colors, bold fonts, and a general sense of chaos to sell director Jordan Vogt-Roberts' upcoming movie. The footage we've seen so far suggests that we're in for "kitchen sink" experience with everything that can possibly be stuffed into the movie jammed in there, so this poster feels appropriate.

For a point of comparison, here's the poster for the 1967 Kaiju movie King Kong Escapes, which finds the big guy battling a robotic version of himself called Mechani-Kong. While the Kong: Skull Island poster is a slicker product, you can very much see the influence of this style of poster on the final design.

While there is an impressive human cast in Kong: Skull Island (including Tom Hiddleston, John Goodman, Samuel L. Jackson, and Brie Larson), the poster rightfully puts Kong and the other monstrous denizens of Skull Island front-and-center. Just a few days ago, Vogt-Roberts explained how his cast of monsters was inspired by Princess Mononoke:

The creatures are a big thing. Jurassic World obviously owns the dinosaur thing right now. If Kong is the God of this island, we wanted each of the creatures to feel like they're individual gods of their own domain. Miyazaki and Princess Mononoke was actually a big reference in the way that the spirit creatures sort of have their own domains and fit within that. A big thing was trying to design creatures that felt realistic and could exist in an ecosystem that feels sort of wild and out there, and then also design things that simultaneously felt beautiful and horrifying at the same time. Where if you look at this giant spider or water buffalo, you stare at, a part of you says, 'that's the most amazing thing I've ever seen' and 'oh my god, that's going to kill me right now, I need to run for my life!

Kong: Skull Island opens on March 10, 2017.