Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is shaping up to be one of 2024's most intriguing and exciting movies, and according to filmmaker Wes Ball, his pitch boiled down to one simple line: "Apocalypto with apes."
That 2006 movie - which is presented in the Mayan language - took viewers on a thrilling, emotionally powerful journey through a dangerous jungle in early 1500s Yucatán; presumably, Noa's journey through this world - the action has been confirmed to take place 300 years after War for the Planet of the Apes - will seemingly take its cues from that epic tale.
In an interview with Empire Online (via SFFGazette.com), producer Joe Hartwick says the main goal of this movie is to deliver an event movie which is a little less grim than the previous trilogy.
"The last couple of movies concerned Caesar’s burden," he explains. "Much like The Dark Knight, they felt heavy - super-enjoyable, but super-intense. We’re going in a different direction. Noa still has a burden, but it’s wrapped in a different level of adventure, mostly because the character hasn’t been exposed to the outside world before. So we’re seeing him see the world for the first time."
This lines up with much of what we've previously heard and explains why Disney has enlisted a filmmaker best known for his work on the Young Adult adventure series, Maze Runner. However, as VFX Supervisor Erik Winquist reveals, they're ultimately just embracing what made the 1968 original so great.
He teases a river-rapids chase which is a "big, cataclysmic biblical kind of event" and adds, "It was apparent on the page that this was going to be tricky in a number of instances, where you’ve got wet apes. You start getting into the need to deal with how the water affects the fur and how the fur affects the water. Thankfully we just came off a film called The Way Of Water, so we’ve been able to harness a lot of the experience and the tech that went into that film."
Ball recently teased his wider plans for the franchise when he said, "From the beginning we thought about this as a trilogy. We had these grand ideas of where it could ultimately go and how it could fit into the legacy of these movies. So I’m certainly talking to [the studio] right now about the next story."
"Those last three movies were about the end of something. They were about the end of this Moses story. They were about the end of humanity," the director adds. "And we thought, ‘From the ashes of those previous movies, we’re gonna grow a new tree to climb.’ This movie is very much about the beginning of something."
You can take a look at some new Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes concept art and a still in the X posts below.
Director Wes Ball breathes new life into the global, epic franchise set several generations in the future following Caesar's reign, in which apes are the dominant species living harmoniously and humans have been reduced to living in the shadows.
As a new tyrannical ape leader builds his empire, one young ape undertakes a harrowing journey that will cause him to question all that he has known about the past and to make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, a new entry in 20th Century Studios' global, epic franchise, opens exclusively in theaters on May 24, 2024.