The on-again, off-again Planet Of The Apes reboot in development over at Twentieth Century Fox is looking like it is back on again.
Director Rupert Wyatt has been brought on board to oversee the project’s development, replacing writer/director Scott Frank, who left at the beginning of the year.
Currently titled Caesar, the film will tell the story of the first chimpanzee to gain sentience enough to lead rebellion against humans, thus leading to the conditions seen in the classic science-fiction franchise. Although the original series had its own version of how Earth came under the dominion of apes, this new film would allow for the possibility of charting a new franchise of pictures.
The project came to the studio originally by writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver under the title Genesis: Apes. Reportedly, their original drafts as well as Frank’s work on the film all contained powerful political allegory which made the studio nervous. I am afraid that Wyatt may have been brought in to tone down the politics, which is a pity, because political and social commentary was very much an important element in the original Apes series and a new Apes movie would seem a little empty without it.
