King Kong Climbs the Empire State Building

King Kong opened on March 2, 1933, at Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy next door, RKO running the same picture at the same time in the two biggest movie palaces the company owned. Film Daily counted 50,000 people through the doors of Radio City Music Hall in a single day. By the six-day mark the two houses had taken in $100,157 between them, according to The Hollywood Reporter, a real sum for a company that Wikipedia's own account says was at risk of bankruptcy because of the Great Depression. Three days after the premiere, Franklin Roosevelt declared a national bank holiday and shut every bank in the country, and even Kong's box office cooled with it, second-week receipts dropping by as much as half. The image that outlasted all of it was the ape on top of the Empire State Building, swatting at planes, less than two years after the building itself had opened a few blocks south.