We only have the full 1933 King Kong because of a 35mm print found in Argentina, so you never know what you may find.
I never knew that, that’s awesome! Out of question- did they even bother to keep film negatives back then, or did they burn them to retrieve the silver nitrate?
RKO kept the negative - but they cut it to satisfy the Production Code for the 1938 re-release. (As per usual for the time, the cuts were made directly to the negative. I guess the negative trims could have been melted down to retrieve the silver, or possibly just thrown out. After all, at the time it would have been easy to assume that the MPAA was never going to allow them to exhibit the uncut version again, so they wouldn’t have had much incentive to keep them.) All the highest-generation positive and dupe negative elements were made off of the already cut negative.
However, they did indeed eventually destroy the negative; in a 1989 American Cinematographer article, the then-director of Turner’s film archives made an educated guess that it because it was worn out from printing too many copies off of it - in his words, “Kong was a victim of its own success.” (I’m not sure if nitrate film was still in use at the time, so I don’t know if it was melted down to retrieve the silver during its destruction. I suppose it’s possible, but it likely wasn’t the primary reason for its destruction.)