Fantastic Four: First Steps director Matt Shakman and writer Josh Friedman are said to be rebooting the Apes saga, not continuing on from Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes. Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes left plenty of threads open for another film in the saga, but 20th Century Studios is instead thinking ... Planet Of The Apes to be rebooted by the makers of Fantastic Four: First Steps (report)
Fantastic Four: First Steps director Matt Shakman and writer Josh Friedman are said to be rebooting the Apes saga, not continuing on from Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes.
Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes left plenty of threads open for another film in the saga, but 20th Century Studios is instead thinking about wiping the slate clean.
That’s according to a report at Deadline, whose sources claim that director Matt Shakman is set to make a reboot rather than a sequel to the previous film, released in 2024. Shakman, of course, previously directed the frothy Marvel reboot, The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
One common thread here is screenwriter Josh Friedman, who wrote both 2024’s Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes and last year’s Fantastic Four reboot. Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, who’ve produced all the Apes films released since 2011 (and also wrote several of them) are also still aboard.
Kingdom director Wes Ball has moved onto other projects; he’s currently working on the adaptation of The Legend Of Zelda, due out in 2027.
The (reported) decision to reboot the Apes franchise is, from an outsider’s perspective, mildly surprising. From 2022 until at least 2024, the widely-discussed plan was to make this a trilogy of films. In fact, at one stage Jaffa and Silver said they had ideas for at least four movies in this iteration of the saga.
Jaffa and Silver successfully steered the previous Apes trilogy, which began with Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, directed by Rupert Wyatt, and concluded with Matt Reeves’ even better Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes and War For The Planet Of The Apes.
Assuming the report’s correct, Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes will be left dangling, the characters it introduced – Noa the chimpanzee, Freya Allen’s secretive human, Mae – stranded mid-story. Instead, “the film will mark a return to the planet where apes are the superior species ruling all,” the report goes.
Kingdom wasn’t a massive hit compared to its budget, which might be what gave producers at 20th Century (or its owners, Disney) pause for thought.
The knee-jerk reaction here would be to throw out the weighty themes and seriousness of the earlier films and go for something brighter and more family-friendly.
And those titles – yeesh, so ungainly. The Apes: First Steps, anyone?
We’ll bring you more on the Apes situation as it unfolds.
