Planet Of The Apes Re-Rebooted : Movie News

If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. It’s a pretty solid piece of life advice, and one the owners of the Planet of the Apes franchise seem to treat as gospel.

To be honest, I never really latched onto the “Classic” Planet Of The Apes movies – my Dad loves them… but he also loves Clarence : The Talking Mule… so, who is he to judge – and I think most of us fell in the “That Tim Burton Movie Made No Sense” category when it comes to the 2001 remake. So is another re-reboot (fast becoming the “in thing” in Hollywood at the moment) really going to set the world on fire?

According to Vulture, Twentieth Century Fox thinks it will and have taken another step forward in the long mooted re-reboot of Planet of the Apes (which was initially rebooted by Tim Burton back in 2001 with little success) handing over the franchise rights to former News Corp hemler, Peter Chernin.

Planet Of The Apes... Again

Early reports suggested that the most recent reboot plans hit a wall after it was “discovered that… writer Scott Frank had left the project, an origin story showing just how the apes became so smart”. The report goes on to reveal that “Frank was also supposed to direct the film for producer Scott Rudin” but has since moved on with “agency insiders [confirming] that Fox has hired writer Jamie Moss (Street Kings) to rework Frank’s version, and the original writers, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (The Relic, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle), were recently brought back to polish the dialogue”.

It has been suggested that Scott Frank’s version of the Planet Of The Apes script (code named Caesar) “showed how genetic experiments on apes led to their evolutionary eclipse of humans. Caesar refers to the genetically altered leader of the simian rebellion, so dubbed because the ape was capable of grand strategic thinking on par with Julius Caesar (whose own surname means “hairy” in Latin). The Caesar code name also foreshadowed the script’s plot: Just as the actual Julius Caesar set Rome on the path to the Roman Empire, the experimental ape’s escape sets in motion his fellow hirsute hominids’ guerrilla war and subsequent dominance”.

Peter Chernin has reportedly been keen on the idea, long before Tim Burton’s failed attempt, trying to revive the franchise as far back as 1992 when he paid “Oliver Stone a million dollars to executive produce a Return of the Apes film”, with the film centering on a “geneticist who time-travels back to the Paleolithic Era, where he must help humans win a war against highly evolved apes and protect a young girl whose genes will give ultimately save mankind from a plague”).

Agency insiders reveal that “part of [Chernin's] golden parachute from News Corporation, Chernin has several “Put Pictures” — essentially, a commitment from the studio to get several movies made, even if the studio brass objects – but rumours suggest that “Chernin may not even need to waste one of his puts : The studio wants to make the Caesar project, post haste” with a “director… expected to be hired imminently”.

Keep an eye on this space, monkey lovers!