▲ Esther Hannaford, Chris Ryan and the famous ape in the 2013 production of “King Kong” in Melbourne, Australia.

He’s arriving a little later than anticipated, but “King Kong” is finally ready to attack Broadway.

On Wednesday, the producers of this big-budget, big-ape spectacle — they’re no longer describing it as a traditional musical, although it’s a stage show with a score and songs — said “King Kong” would arrive at the Broadway Theater in the fall of 2018.

The show is the brainchild of an Australian animatronics company, and its only previous production was in Melbourne. Its arrival on Broadway has been long delayed: In 2010, the producers said they were aiming for a 2013 Broadway bow; in 2013, they talked of a possible 2014 Broadway opening, as well as international productions of the show; and by 2014, they had stopped attaching a timeline to their project. But now, for the first time, they are announcing a theater as well as a time frame.

Carmen Pavlovic, the lead producer, said “King Kong” had been offered a Broadway theater in 2014, but chose to delay as the show was reconceived after its only previous production, in 2013 in Melbourne. That staging drew high marks for spectacle — there seems to be a consensus that the 20-foot-high title character, a combination puppet-robot, is a compelling marvel — but mixed reviews for storytelling.
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The production has spent the intervening years rethinking how to design a show in which the leading character — Kong — neither speaks nor sings. (He does make sounds, voiced in real time by an actor.)

“Originally, we were imagining a buffed and polished version of what we had in Australia, but something wasn’t clicking, like our puppet was in the middle of someone else’s show,” Ms. Pavlovic said. “We came to a realization of how we could take the physicality of Kong and make it feel like the whole show was born of that idea — we were finding a form that would better tell King Kong’s story.”

The project now has a British writer — Jack Thorne, enjoying enormous success with the Broadway-bound play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” — and a British director, Drew McOnie, who has choreographed recent London productions of “In the Heights” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Both are new to the project; a series of American theater talents — the book writers Craig Lucas and Marsha Norman and the composer Jason Robert Brown — were each replaced over the years.

The show has had one constant: the gorilla, which is powered by a combination of automation, infrared technology and multiple human performers (“Kong’s army”) who bring the creature to life. Ms. Pavlovic is the chief executive of the animatronics company, Global Creatures, best known for arena shows like “Walking With Dinosaurs.” Global Creatures is co-producing the “King Kong” stage show with Roy Furman, a Broadway veteran.

“King Kong” will feature a score by the British composer Marius de Vries, who has been with the project from the beginning, and songs by Eddie Perfect, an Australian musician who is a more recent addition to the team. The story is adapted from a novelization of the screenplay of the 1933 film.

“It isn’t a conventional musical but it certainly still has all the elements of a musical — there is a full orchestra, there are people singing, but there are also great tracks of lyricless score,” Ms. Pavlovic said.

The show has not yet been cast.

The Broadway Theater is now home to a revival of “Miss Saigon,” which has scheduled a limited run through January and is then planning to tour.

The arrival of “King Kong” would make 2018 a big year for blockbuster brands on Broadway: Disney’s stage adaptation of “Frozen” and the Harry Potter play are both scheduled to arrive that spring, just a few months before “Kong.” Ms. Pavlovic said she was confident in the continuing appeal of the Kong brand, noting the success of the recent film “Kong: Skull Island,” and said that she believed that the character of Ann Darrow, whose initial abduction by Kong leads to an emotional relationship that has been repeatedly reimagined over the years, was appealing as “a modern-day female protagonist.”