The Monsterverse is humming along nicely these days — movies, TV, the whole buffet — but a wild almost-happened version of it tried to poke its head out back in 1998. It started with a Harrison Ford payday, ran into a Titanic-sized iceberg, and left a very loud hint of King Kong hiding in plain sight.
The 1998 creature feature that nearly set up Kong
Stephen Sommers made an ocean-bound horror movie called Deep Rising, and tucked inside it was the seed of a bigger plan: a prequel path to Skull Island and a fresh King Kong franchise. Not fan speculation — that was the actual roadmap until the floor fell out from under it.
During development, Harrison Ford was attached to star. The budget hovered around $90 million, reportedly with $15 million earmarked for Ford and a round of rewrites to meet his script notes. Then Air Force One came calling with roughly $22 million, and Ford jumped. Deep Rising lost its marquee name, the budget got chopped in half, and the studio cooled on making it a launchpad for Kong. Those references were stripped out in later drafts.
Timing is everything, and Titanic was everywhere
Deep Rising leaned hard on complicated effects, which pushed the release from 1997 into early 1998. The extra time helped — a surprising number of shots still hold up — but it arrived while James Cameron's Titanic was still swallowing the box office whole. Deep Rising took in just $11 million worldwide. An ocean-liner horror movie debuting in Titanic's afterglow? Brutal timing.
What the movie actually is (and why it ruled on its own terms)
Treat Williams and Famke Janssen (pre-X-Men) lead the cast, with Djimon Hounsou, Wes Studi, Jason Flemyng, Cliff Curtis, and Kevin J. O'Connor backing them up. The setup: a gorgeous luxury cruise ship, a Kraken-adjacent nightmare named the Octalus, and a crew of mercenaries who board to steal high-end loot and instead find the passengers... processed. The tentacles are just the opening act for a much nastier main event, and the victims' fates are genuinely grim.
The studio reportedly asked for a PG-13 pass. The material made that impossible, and it landed as a hard R. For something once meant to tee up Kong, the splatter is way gnarlier than anything in the current Monsterverse or past Kong outings. The Octalus isn't from Godzilla or Kong canon either — it's original — but it would fit right into a modern Titan lineup. The working plan, if things had gone well, was a follow-up called 'Kong Rising.'
The ending that quietly screams Skull Island
Even after the Kong connections were scrubbed, Sommers convinced the studio to keep one last breadcrumb. At the end, the survivors wash up on a remote island. Distant roars roll in from the trees. Then the jungle canopy tears open like paper as something enormous barrels toward the beach. Cue the final line:
'What now?'
That island was meant to be Skull Island. The something enormous? Kong. If the movie had hit, we were heading straight for that reveal in the next chapter.
How the rights shifted and Kong found another door
Deep Rising's underperformance ended that version of the plan, and the King Kong rights moved on. After The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson had blank-check momentum and stepped in for his own King Kong remake. Any proto-Monsterverse ambitions went back on ice until a new path opened with 2014's Godzilla.
The side effect: it accidentally saved The Mummy
Sommers had already signed on to make The Mummy, with that Kong reboot notion intended to follow. If Deep Rising had cratered earlier, the splash damage might have killed The Mummy before cameras rolled. But because Deep Rising spent so long in post, Sommers had already started shooting Brendan Fraser's adventure by the time his ocean horror face-planted. That delay basically protected The Mummy, which spun into its own long-running franchise.
Where that franchise sits now: it's still alive, with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz set to return for a fourth installment. Sommers isn't attached. His career peaked with the first two Mummy films, stumbled on bigger swings like G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, and he hasn't directed since Anton Yelchin's Odd Thomas — 13 years ago.
Meanwhile, the Monsterverse kept growing
Godzilla and Kong finally met in 2021's Godzilla vs. Kong and have been sharing the sandbox ever since. On TV, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is rolling into its second season, and Skull Island got an animated run. The next big-screen chapter, Godzilla x Kong: Supernova, is aiming for 2027. Audience appetite clearly isn't slowing.
How this near-miss played out, in short
- Mid-90s: Deep Rising develops with Harrison Ford, a $90M budget, and a stealth plan to tee up Kong.
- Ford exits for Air Force One; Deep Rising's budget is halved and Kong connections get scrubbed.
- 1998: VFX delays push release into Titanic's wake; the movie grosses $11M worldwide.
- The ending keeps one final Skull Island tease as a backdoor into 'Kong Rising' — which never happens.
- 2005: Peter Jackson delivers his King Kong; the earlier plan is fully dead.
- 2014–present: Godzilla relaunches; Kong joins; the Monsterverse takes shape across film and TV.
- 2027: Godzilla x Kong: Supernova targets theaters as the next big swing.
So yes, an R-rated cruise-ship gorefest once tried to light the fuse for Kong nearly three decades ago. It sank, but not before leaving a roar echoing from the tree line — and clearing the way for The Mummy to live. Not the Monsterverse we got, but a pretty fascinating version of what almost was.
