Fox’s successful prequel Rise of the Planet of the Apes is officially giving way to the Dawn … and it’s happening on May 23, 2014.
Box Office Mojo has posted that release date for the newly-titled sequel Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the continuation of the story started in director Rupert Wyatt’s Rise, which helped set the stage for the ape revolution that would destroy our planet in subsequent Apes movies. But with Wyatt’s sci-fi thriller raking in an impressive $481M at the global box office, 20th Century Fox naturally decided to continue filling in the gaps on the lengthy Apes timeline.
Earlier we reported that Contagion scribe Scott Z. Burns was being brought into the fold to map out the Dawn screenplay and we also know that Andy Serkis is scheduled to return to the motion-capture suit to play Caesar, the intelligent ape experimented on by James Franco’s scientist in Rise who begins the revolution because of his evolution. It’s unclear if room will be made for Franco’s character in the next chapter, or if Wyatt – who’ll return to direct – is going to shift the action to a completely different location and explore new territories.
Based on the ending of Rise, with an airplane carrying a virus across our nation, we can probably expect Dawn to be a fairly violent and apocalyptic sequel. Will humans fight back? How bad will it get for us before we give the planet over to the apes? And how many Apes prequels will Fox try to milk before we end up at the moment where Charlton Heston’s astronaut returns from his mission? We shall see, but it all continues in the summer of 2014.
