Godzilla Vs. Kong – Which Kong is biggest?

This March, it’s time to find out who the king of the food chain is. In the blue corner, you have a titan that spews atomic fire from its mouth, has beaten some of the greatest threats to ever exist on this planet, and earn itself a kickass song from Blue Oyster Cult. In the red corner, you have the most absolute of units, simian savagery on two legs, and able to throw a haymaker that can sink a battleship. Kong!

This version of Kong isn’t just the most detailed and expensive incarnation to ever exist in cinema, he’s also the biggest one ever, a towering juggernaut of monkey madness brought to life by the power of an unlimited Hollywood budget for spectacle. So just how big is this Kong compared to previous versions?

Much much bigger. Here’s the tale of the tape so far.

King Kong 1933 – Disputed

The first Kong may also just be the most flexible out of all the big screen incarnations, as director Merian C. Cooper’s eighth wonder of the world changed according to any scene that he was in. While the original idea was for a 40 to 50-foot tall ape to rampage through the film, it’s generally accepted that the first king was on average, a mere 24 feet tall. Not unimpressive, but absolutely tiny when compared to later incarnations.

Son of Kong – 12 feet

Much smaller, but with twice the personality of his dear old dad, Kong Jr towered over regular men with a height of 12 feet. That’s not too bad, and if he was given the chance to grow, he might have even surpassed his father in the end. Pity that the film was absolute garbage.

King Kong vs. Godzilla – 147 feet

Your eyes do not deceive you! Kong has tangled with the Big G before, and for his Japanese debut he got one heck of a grow-up. Toho’s Kong was a gargantuan 147 feet tall, and even though he was still shorter than Japan’s Kaiju king, his overall height was enough to secure him a spot in the Kong record books until the latest film decided to push the scale even further.

King Kong Escapes – 65 feet

Toho wasn’t done with Kong yet, and in a new film he returned for more ape shenanigans. This Kong was much smaller than his last appearance however, but he still clocked in at a very respectable 65 feet in height. This Kong also took on the dread might of Mechani-Kong, which is exactly what you think it is: A giant robot Kong, that would be the subject of a great song many years later.

King Kong 1976

The king was back on American cinema screens, and producer Dino DeLaurentiis wanted to make certain that audiences knew just how massive his ape really was. In addition to being constructed from cutting edge animatronics at the time, the resurrected Kong was actually more in line with classic appearances, reaching a whopping 55 feet in height by the time he made landfall in New York. But he wasn’t done growing just yet!

King Kong Lives

Although a box office flop, 1986’s King Kong sequel did add an extra couple of inches to Kong, scaling him up to 60 feet and also adding some bonkers story elements like a heart transplant operation for the ages, a return to Skull Island, and some monkey on monkey love. Moving on!

King Kong 2005

Lord of the Ringd trilogy director Peter Jackson imagined a more believable giant ape, and with a love of the original film, he set out to use cutting edge CGI at the time to craft a gigantic silverback gorrilla that had been through numerous wars on Skull Island. A grizzled veteran of numerous encounters with ferocious prehistoric beasts, Kong was faster, stronger, and more cunning than most previous incarnations.

At 25 feet tall, Kong was still a force to be reckoned with, but one that tragically met its end due to a combination of love, skyscrapers, and a crapload of bullets.

Kong: Skull Island – 104 feet tall

The main event is here! After a long absence on the silver screen, Legendary and director Jordan Vogt-Roberts teamed up to unleash a Kong that the world had never seen before. More human-like in appearance and a staggering 104 feet tall, this Kong wasn’t just a nigh-unstoppable force of nature that the best military equipment of 1973 was no match for.

He was still growing.

Eventually defeating the dreaded kaiju of Skull Island, this Kong showed that he was a force to be reckoned with, thanks to a combination of brute strength and devious cunning that allowed this great ape to use his environment to his advantage. Having dealt with several overgrown lizards, this Kong is more than ready to throw down against anything that nuclear science could give birth to.

Godzilla vs. Kong – 350 – 400 feet

Who’s the real king of the monsters? Godzilla may have claimed that title when it defeated Ghidorah and other titans kneeled before the unstoppable apex predator, but Kong is ready to challenge the Big G for supremacy.

This version? To keep up with Godzilla, he has quadrupled in size. There’s no exact estimate yet, but thanks to the known scaling of Legendary’s Godzilla, Kong is now close to 400 feet in total, making this the king of all Kongs. Billy Mitchell is going to be so mad when he finds out about this. And those are the numbers! Kong gears up for the fight of his life this March, in cinemas and on HBO Max.

Who will win? A gigantic lizard that can shrug off nuclear bombs or a big monkey with a stick? I don’t know, but it should make for some good viewing when these kaiju kings throw down at long last.

Last Updated: January 31, 2021