Peter Jackson confirmed to do King Kong next.

Hollywood studio Universal announced today that Jackson's next project would be a re-telling of King Kong to begin immediately after his work is finished on the third and final part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King.
"I'm making movies today because I saw this film when I was nine years old. It has been my sustained dream to reinterpret this classic story for a new age," Jackson said in a Universal statement.

This is not entirely new news; Jackson did some pre-production work on a Kong remake after finishing The Frighteners back in '96 before the studio canned the project after discovering remakes of Godzilla and Mighty Joe Young were due for release at the same time. And there was talk even last year that he would be returning to Kong after finishing the Tolkien films. Still, it seems to be confirmed now... don't know if I entirely like the idea of a Kong remake, cos apart from digital effects I don't know what else you can do with it; this page suggests "Jackson's incarnation of King Kong will follow a much darker path than the previous versions", but the 1933 original (which was on Ch.2 here just two nights ago) is a surprisingly dark piece of work for its period; the stop-motion effects may have dated in the last seven decades but it's remarkable how violent it is. I mean, Kong eats people and tramples them to death. There weren't many other films in 1933 where you saw that sort of thing happen. Still, if it has to happen, I suppose Jackson will at least do a good job...

posted by James Russell | 8:37 PM