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With Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, this beloved, long-running sci-fi franchise has finally hit double digit movies, with the modern iteration of the series running for nearly as many films (4) as the franchise’s original run back in the 1960s and ’70s (5). While the first three movies in the rebooted series focused on the very beginning of the ape takeover of Earth, Kingdom jumps forward in time by “many generations,” taking us closer to the status quo of the original film.
For Kingdom director Wes Ball, who previously handled that same duty on all three Maze Runner films and is also directing the upcoming Legend of Zelda movie, that time skip is a significant move toward the endgame he wants for the series: to close the franchise at the same place it began, with 20th century astronaut Charlton Heston crash landing on future Earth without having a clue what’s been going on.
We’re not there yet, of course–there aren’t any crash-landing spaceships in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. While this is the fourth movie in the rebooted franchise, it’s really the beginning of a new era for the apes, with the previous three movies serving as the background lore for what’s going on in the present.
“The previous three movies were very much the ending of something,” Kingdom director Wes Ball told me while promoting the film. “They were stories about the end of the human world. They were a story about the end of Caesar. And we very much wanted to be the beginning of something. Getting that distance allowed us to start the movie in a way where the audience itself gets to go back and rediscover what’s happened to Caesars legacy, what’s happened to the human world, what’s happened to apes, how far along have they gotten, how many other different clans are out there, you know, all these different things.”
For Ball, the idea of all these different ape groups separately developing their civilizations made for a fascinating canvas on which to craft this film. In Kingdom, the protagonists are the ones who’ve never heard of Caesar, and the bad guys are the ones who fight in his name. But even with this film, Ball had his eye on the long-term prize.
“All throughout the planet, there are other apes that have their own kind of explosion into intelligence. So that’s a cool idea. We ran with that here with this Noa character and this whole tribe,” Ball said. “And this whole time as we’re leaving behind the Caesar trilogy, carrying forward all the stuff we want to carry forward, we also have in our sights that ’68 original that we’re heading towards…we’ve still a long way to go before it gets there, before Charlton Heston crashes down through the skies, but that’s gonna be really fun I think if we’re fortunate enough to continue on the story.”
For now, this plan is a nebulous one–it’s not a “we’re going to do this two movies from now” kind of situation. It’s more of an aspiration for now, and Ball freely admitted it might not happen.
“Will we ever get there? I couldn’t tell you. There’s plenty of stories to be told before you get to that ’68 movie. If I had my way, you wouldn’t remake the 68 movie, you would just build up to it. And you cut and you go back to the ’68 movie, and you start all over and that’s that’s the whole franchise. That’s my idea, but this isn’t my franchise to do with whatever I want. So take it with a grain of salt,” Ball said, chuckling.
A big development that should happen on the way to that destination is that the apes should eventually wear clothes–in that original film, the apes have normal human posture and wear clothes. In Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, ape society hasn’t reached that point yet, but it’s moving that direction.
“You see in this movie the beginnings of some of that stuff. You see Raka have adornments, and the Eagle tribe. Proximus Caesar starting to dress himself like the things he’s learned about from Roman history. You see an echo throughout all the designs, they’re starting down that path again,” Ball said.
