Jordan Vogt-Roberts, the Kong: Skull Island director who lost Metal Gear and Gundam

Jordan Vogt-Roberts

Photo: PunkToad from oakland, us / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 22, 1984 Detroit, Michigan, United States
Occupation	Film and television director
Known for	Kong: Skull Island, The Kings of Summer
Awards	Narrative Feature Audience Award, Dallas International Film Festival

Somewhere at Sony there is a version of Metal Gear Solid that Jordan Vogt-Roberts was attached to for more than a decade, and he will not be the one to shoot it. Columbia Pictures’ adaptation of Hideo Kojima’s stealth saga now sits with Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, the duo behind Final Destination: Bloodlines. The live-action Gundam he was hired to make for Netflix and Legendary had already gone to Jim Mickle. For the director whose Kong: Skull Island sent a squadron of helicopters into the fists of a giant ape and earned more than half a billion dollars, the odd fact of his career is how little of it has reached a screen since.

The gap stands out because his route into blockbusters was so unlikely. He came up through internet comedy, making web series and shorts with friends, and his calling card was a small film about teenagers who run away to build a house in the Ohio woods. Studios read in it a director who could put boys in the wilderness and keep the jokes from tipping into parody. Legendary bet a monster movie on that reading.

The Detroit suburbs shaped him. Jordan Charles Vogt-Roberts arrived on 22 September 1984 and grew up in Royal Oak, Michigan; when his family moved to Arizona he was fourteen, and he went back to Royal Oak for his senior year to graduate with the friends he had grown up with, finishing at Dondero High School in 2003. He went on to Columbia College Chicago, graduating in 2006, and a year later had his first directing credit, the documentary Twit: Robert Buscemi, Live at the Subterranean.

Through the late 2000s he directed web series such as Memoirs of a Manchild, Book Club and Single Dads, then wrote and directed the short Successful Alcoholics, which played Sundance, SXSW and AFI Fest in 2010. Cable television came next. He directed Comedy Central’s sketch show Mash Up, episodes of Funny or Die Presents, MTV’s monster-cop comedy Death Valley and FX’s You’re the Worst, along with Nick Offerman: American Ham, a stand-up special for the actor he had just cast as a father in his first feature.

That feature was The Kings of Summer. It premiered at Sundance in 2013 under the title Toy’s House and competed for the Grand Jury Prize. Written by Chris Galletta and shot in Ohio, it follows three teenagers, played by Nick Robinson, Gabriel Basso and Moises Arias, who build a ramshackle house in the forest to escape their parents; Offerman and Megan Mullally play the adults they are fleeing. The film took the narrative audience award at the Dallas International Film Festival, and its sunlit, slightly absurd tone became the thing producers wanted to hire.

Legendary named him director of Kong: Skull Island in 2014. He set the film in 1973, as the Vietnam War wound down, cast Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman and John C. Reilly, and shot in Hawaii and across Vietnam, from Ha Long Bay to the karst landscapes of Ninh Binh and Phong Nha-Ke Bang. Released in March 2017, it grossed more than $560 million worldwide and became the second chapter of the MonsterVerse, after Godzilla. He also hid a boat named Gray Fox in it, a nod to a Metal Gear character, because Sony had been talking to him about that adaptation since 2014. Vietnam made him its tourism ambassador that March, the first foreign filmmaker in the post, and he moved to Ho Chi Minh City.

Six months later the move nearly killed him. In September 2017 he was attacked at a nightclub in the city and left with a fractured skull, bleeding on the brain and a ten-day stay in hospital. “This was not a fight,” he told GQ. “I was almost killed as were others.” Working with the GQ journalist Max Marshall, he pieced together who had attacked him, and one of the assailants was later arrested in India.

The industry story about him since then has been told as a list of announcements, and that framing flatters no one. Metal Gear Solid was his from 2014, after meetings with Hideo Kojima and with Oscar Isaac publicly keen to play Snake. Gundam arrived in 2021 with Brian K. Vaughan writing. A Detroit-set creature feature with Michael B. Jordan producing was announced in 2019. He was due to direct the pilot of The Walking Dead: World Beyond and was replaced by Magnus Martens, keeping a co-executive producer credit. The fair reading is not that he failed; Kong: Skull Island is a confident piece of large-scale filmmaking. It is that development deals reward a director’s passion more than his output, and his passion for games, which earned him a cameo as “the film director” in Kojima’s Death Stranding and brought him commercials for Destiny 2 and PUBG, made him the natural name for adaptations studios then took years to commit to. When Deadline reported Mickle’s hiring on Gundam in October 2024, it noted only that Netflix and Vogt-Roberts were no longer involved. In April 2026 The Hollywood Reporter announced the new Metal Gear Solid directors without mentioning him at all.

His most recent work came through television. He directed the premiere of Peacock’s Hysteria!, a horror comedy about the satanic panic of the 1980s with Bruce Campbell, Julie Bowen and Anna Camp, and served as executive producer. It launched in October 2024 to warm reviews, and Peacock cancelled it after one season, in February 2025, without giving a reason.

Nine years after Kong: Skull Island, he has no feature with a release date. The Michael B. Jordan creature film is still listed as untitled and undated. What his next move needs is not proof that he can handle scale, which the ape already settled, but a studio willing to shoot a project of his rather than announce it.

Tags: Tom Hiddleston, Hideo Kojima, Nick Offerman, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Kong: Skull Island, The Kings of Summer

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