[The following story contains mild spoilers for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.]
With rave reviews and a projected opening weekend of up to $145 million worldwide, Wes Ball’s film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is ready to successfully relaunch the Monkeys franchise. The film picks up where Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves’ reboot trilogy left off withWar for the Planet of the Apes (2017), as Ball depicts the funeral of Caesar (Andy Serkis) before jumping forward several centuries to a time when Caesar has become a legend.
In 2019, after his three Maze runner films grossed nearly $1 billion on a $156 million spend, Ball was days away from production at 20th Century Fox Mouse guard adaptation, but the Disney-Fox merger abruptly canceled its ambitious mocap-centric project which had Reeves and Serkis as producer and actor respectively. However, later that year, Ball received a call from 20th’s longtime president of production, Emma Watts, which he said was his way of making amends. Mouse guardThe collapse.
“Yeah, that’s probably what it was…Emma Watts called me and said, ‘Sorry about the Mouse guard thing, but what would you do with the next Planet of the Apes“, says Ball The Hollywood Reporter. “So it took me a minute to wrap my head around this idea. I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do until we found something that I thought was a worthy follow-up to the previous three.
Ball’s path to a potential new trilogy began with the aforementioned time jump where different ape clans now reside in their own villages, including the Eagle Clan and their sheltered but serene existence alongside their loyal companions Eagles. Noa (Owen Teague), a sentient young chimpanzee, is about to reach adulthood within the Eagle Clan when Proximus Caesar’s (Kevin Durand) hostile coastal ape clan pillages his family’s community. , forcing him to go on a journey where he finally discovers the real world and who the real Caesar was to the orangutan scholar Raka (Peter Macon), and who he was not to the power-hungry bonobo, Proximus.
Most interestingly, Noa also meets a seemingly wild human, but it’s actually a smart young woman named Mae (Freya Allan), establishing that this potential new trilogy won’t be an ape story that resets its cast human in each film like the previous one. trilogy from the 2010s.
“You think Kingdom It’s going to be a monkey story, but at the end of the movie you realize it’s actually a monkey And a human story,” says Ball. “Mae was always going to be this little riddle that we had to slowly solve throughout the storyline, and at the end of the film we literally open the door to a whole new world that we can play in if we’re lucky enough to do so. more movies. Can Apes and Humans Live Together?
