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Sorry, but this is TERRIBLE news if there is no option to see the film WITHOUT these additions. I do hope this is only "gossip".

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Not true, at Digitalbits.com Robert Harris talked at length with someone at Warners about the upcoming Kong DVD and below is the part about the "Spider Scene.":

RH: George, can you give me any information that has not been discussed as far as extras.

GF: We waited eight years into the DVD era to release King Kong, and there was a very good reason. The same reason we waited more than four years to release Citizen Kane. There simply were no film elements acceptable to Warner Bros. for our quality standards. Although we own the RKO library outright, the previous owners sublicensed certain international rights many years ago, and those licensees had released DVDs of these films, but we felt we could do better if we waited to find better film element sources. The improvements in DVD authoring technology over the years also are certainly a benefit. We always wanted to get it out, but we wanted to get it right (or as best as we could) the first time, and so when Ned and his many talented colleagues finally assembled a series of elements they considered worthy of release, we knew we could start moving.

Soon thereafter, when Peter Jackson had arrived in Los Angeles to attend the Academy Awards in 2004 (and take home his Best Director statuette among others), he learned we were preparing the original Kong for DVD, and asked to meet with us. We knew he was one of the world's foremost Kong experts. When we met he expressed his interest in working with his talented crew to recreate the infamous "missing spider pit sequence" that was cut from Kong before its original theatrical release. So among the many enhanced content special features on our new Kong DVD, there's a fascinating piece on how Mr. Jackson and his crew went about this. They recreated many of the original models used in the stop-motion animation in the sequence, but Mr. Jackson has in his own KONG collection, one of the actual original models from that portion of the film. The model was much too old and delicate to be used in this re-creation sequence, but they needed to know how this puppet worked inside, so they could build a new one that worked and looked like the original. They took in the vintage original model to a hospital and had it x-rayed. This whole process was documented for the DVD while these talented artisans were filming this little re-creation of a missing two and a half minute sequence. It's really quite fascinating.

RH: This is starting to sound like Forgotten Silver, certainly one of the finest mockumentaries ever created.

GF: Yeah, it's really amazing. I underscore this - we do not support cutting this into the motion picture because it was not part of the release, and it is not the missing footage. It's very, very clear that this man who loved King Kong so much so that it's his favorite film, and it made him want to be a filmmaker. He and his colleagues really got together as a labor of love to try to re-create this. And fortunately the script, photographs, and surviving sketches and storyboards gave them enough to go on to make it really close to what they think it really was. And they're very clear about that. But the icing was that they matched the grain structure and the look and the grey scale of the surrounding footage so that it really looks authentic. And I have not seen King Kong umpteen times like most people have. I've seen it once or twice and was basically waiting around for something beautiful like what Ned and his company have done. So I wasn't familiar enough to know where the old footage stopped and the new footage that Jackson shot cut in. They present the footage with bookends (it's not reinserted into the film).

RH: And is it transparent?

GF: I couldn't tell where the old ended and the new began. Someone who's a lot more familiar with the film might be able to, but I couldn't, and we were watching it projected in a digital cinema.

RH: Well, for a lot of people, I think that alone is going to be worth the price of admission.

GF: I certainly think so. The passion that went into putting so much effort into reconstructing an approximation of 2 minutes of lost film is quite fascinating. There are many other special features of the disc, many of which had Mr. Jackson's involvement. Additionally, we are proud to have commissioned Kevin Brownlow and Patrick Stanbury of Photoplay Productions Ltd to create a new documentary on Merian C. Cooper, the true father of the Eighth Wonder of the World. The title, I'm King Kong: the Exploits of Merian C. Cooper is a great one, because he was the creator of this character and he was such an adventurer himself. He was more like Carl Denham than anybody else in the world. So I think that people will be thrilled by the whole way that we present all of this. And there's a whole piece dedicated to Max Steiner. This is really one of the first landmark film scores. And tributes are paid to Willis O'Brien... even David O. Selznick's involved in that he gave Cooper and Schoedsack the freedom to do what they wanted to do. And then we have all the existing footage from Creation, which you know is the film that they were making at RKO that was stopped when they started making King Kong.

RH: Right.

GF: So, that footage came from the Library of Congress but the shots were all out of order and they were just kind of a mish-mash. What Peter Jackson and his team did was that they utilized the original shooting script intended for Creation so they put it all back together in proper order. That's just a nice little bonus.