Unlike most franchises, the reboot of Planet Of The Apes had a pretty brilliant idea: If you remake the crappy entries of a series people have only seen on cable while drunk at 3am, and actually try to make them good movies, people will pay to see them! Amazingly, this strategy has worked, and will be going for a threepeat with War For The Planet Of The Apes.
If you’re wondering why this franchise is up to its third entry, the answer is armed apes on horseback are surprisingly popular. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes made $700 million at the global box office and did far better with critics than a movie about talking gorillas is generally expected to. It helps that somebody at Fox realized the series didn’t lack for good ideas, just decent execution. They won’t officially call them remakes, but this has a lot of parallels with Battle for the Planet Of the Apes, widely considered the worst of the franchise. (And based at our early look at three scenes, it seems like this will live up to its predecessors.)
The interesting part is that the franchise is rather blatantly heading for the full-on, Statue of Liberty-on-the-beach original, what with the apes keeping an adorable little girl as a pet and the humans going full right-wing militia right down to Woody Harrelson in the bald head and goatee. But perhaps they’re waiting to see where the franchise goes at the box office, before they go there. We’ll find out July 14th.
(via YouTube)
