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War for the Planet of the Apes could have easily ended the “reboot” era of the Apes franchise, with audiences being left to imagine what happened after the death of Andy Serkis’ Caesar. Instead, we’ll revisit this world next year in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, with the story picking up roughly 300 years after Caesar’s passing. One of Kingdom’s producers and its VFX supervisor have opened up about director Wes Ball’s vision for the 2024 movie release, and it involves a simple pitch he came up with: “Apocalypto with apes.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Apocalypto, the 2006 Mel Gibson-directed movie took place in Yucatán circa 1502 and followed a young man named Jaguar Paw being forced on a dangerous journey through the jungle, with all of the dialogue being spoken in the Indigenous Yucatec Mayan language. Once Ball decided he wanted to channel Apocalypto’s type of energy for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, he “had this flood of ideas, as there was now a way to “set a whole new trajectory” for this Apes timeline, as he told Empire. Producer Joe Hartwick elaborated on what Ball will deliver with this new chapter by saying the following about the main protagonist, Owen Teague’s Noa:
The last couple of movies concerned Caesar’s burden. 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.
We don’t know much about how Earth looks in Noa’s time beyond what was shown in the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes trailer, but evidently the young ape has been living a sheltered life. However, something will require him to depart his home and journey into an unfamiliar world. Along the way, he’ll meet another key member of the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes cast, Freya Allan’s Mae, one of the feral humans descended from the remnants of humanity that survived the Simian Flu. While it hasn’t been revealed yet how Noa and Mae cross paths, it may be as a result of of a human-hunt sequence that echoes the one from the original Planet of the Apes movie.
Kingdom will also feature a river-rapids chase and what VFX supervisor Erik Winquist describes as a “a big, cataclysmic biblical kind of event.” Of course, the ape characters will once again be performed through motion capture, though Windquist noted that putting them into “fresh environments,” particularly damp ones, delivered new challenges for the VFX team. In his words:
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.
Along with Wes Ball directing Kingdom, Josh Friedman, Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and Patrick Aison all worked on the script. Other actors appearing in the movie include Kevin Durand as Proximus Caesar, Peter Macon ad Raka, William H. Macy, Eka Danville, Neil Sandilands, Sara Wiseman, Lydia Peckham, Ras-Samuel Weld A’abzgi and Dichen Bachman. Kingdom is intended to be the first installment in a new trilogy, but whether that plan is actually implemented remains to be seen.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes hits theaters on May 24, 2024. Those wanting to stream any of the previous three Apes movies can view Rise and War with a Hulu subscription, though a Live TV add-on is required for the latter, and Dawn with a Max subscription.