Planets Of The Apes Reboot Going Ahead

With Weta Digital providing CG simians

When  Tim Burton made his version of Planet Of The Apes he popularised the phrase “re-imagining”, although many critics responded that it felt more like a de-imagining. Now, 20th Century Fox is in reimagining mode again with the franchise, and the next Planet Of The Apes film is going to be very different indeed, not least because for the first time the apes will be created digitally instead of by using make-up and prosthetics.

Fox has announced that Rise Of The Apes will be released on 24 June 2011, with Lord Of The Rings’ visual effects house Weta Digital employing some of the groundbreaking technologies developed for Avatar to create CGI simians.

Rupert Wyatt (The Escapist) is directing from a screenplay by Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa, who also are producing. The story is loosely based on the fourth film of the original franchise, Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes, which concerned the beginnings of a revolt by intelligent apes against human beings in the near future. But in that film, the revolt was instigated by an ape from the future, Caesar. The new film will ignore all that time travel nonsense. Set in present day San Francisco, it’s a reality-based cautionary tale in which man’s own experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.