In many ways, the rebooted Planet Of The Apes franchise has gone a little bit under the radar. The $481 million grossing Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes came a few weeks after Captain America: The First Avenger teased The Avengers, while back in June 2014, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes was released a week after Transformers: Age Of Extinction, yet still grossed $710 million, only for Guardians Of The Galaxy to take the end of the summer by storm. Luckily for us, it looks as though the Planet Of The Apes franchise isn't going to finish any time soon, as the plan is for it to continue beyond the upcoming War For The Planet Of The Apes.
Producer Dylan Clark and director Matt Reeves made this admission to me last week when I sat down to talk to them about War For The Planet Of The Apes at New York Comic Con. I quizzed the pair about whether War For The Planet Of The Apes would be the end of the trilogy and conclude Caesar's arc. This lead Dylan Clark to insist that they never intended to just make a trilogy, and that while they're just focusing on one movie at a time, there's plenty of room to explore the universe through these characters with several more installments. Clark stated:
We always come at it from the same place. Which is Matt and Mark go away and talk about, we want to explore characters as much as possible and put them in situations. We know that the 1968 Heston movie was a radically different planet with apes that are radically different from the apes that we're experiencing. So we want to go through this time to explore a lot of different things. We never set out to make a trilogy. We've been asked questions, '[Is] the next one going to be The Planet Of The Apes.' Our hope is that we make a whole movie that works here, and that we can continue with these characters that we love.
The perpetually enthusiastic Matthew Reeves, who directed Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes and has continued his adventures with the series on War For The Planet Of The Apes, admitted that the current trilogy has focused on how Caesar becomes a mythical, deity like figure in Ape history. Still, he also insisted this isn't the ending. Reeves remarked:
You know one of the cool things we love about these movies is that they are not remakes. So you enter it from a totally new perspective, it's an ape perspective series. And as we're on that journey these are new stories that all lead to a trajectory where we already know the ending. And because we know the ending, the story is not what happens but how it happens. And they're psychological character stories. That's the fun of it. So the trilogy I'd say is that this is a Caesar arc that is specifically in our minds how he becomes a mythic, giant character. He is the sort of the seminal figure in ape history. And the events of this war, and what he does in this war cement his position in that place. But we don't see this story as ending.
We'll get to see where the third installment to the Planet Of The Apes reboot series leaves things when War For The Planet Of The Apes is released on July 14, 2017.
