Nobody was really crying out for Planet of the Apes to be rebooted again following Tim Burton’s notorious misfire that saw plans for sequels swiftly abandoned, but everybody ended up eating their words after we ended up with one of the greatest trilogies in cinematic history.
In the hands of Rupert Wyatt and then Matt Reeves, audiences were gifted with a trio of stunning blockbusters that combined to earn north of $1.4 billion at the box office and receive respective Rotten Tomatoes scores of 82, 91, and 94 percent to go along with their 77, 88, and 84 percent user ratings.
Rise, Dawn, and War were nothing short of phenomenal, with Andy Serkis raising the bar for mo-cap performances onto another plane of existence with his staggering work as Caesar, which made Disney’s decision to reheat the franchise with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes seem questionable from the outset.
After all, if the saga is coming hot off the back of a genuine classic triptych, then it’s easy to see why the Mouse House was accused of leveraging a proven brand for the sake of monetizing it even further. And yet, the first teaser trailer hints that The Maze Runner‘s Wes Ball may have crafted a worthy successor.
There’s not a lot of footage to go on, but it certainly looks to be a spiritual successor to Rise, Dawn, and War in terms of scope, scale, and aesthetic, and it even hints it’ll be hewing closer to the classic 1968 original than ever before. Will it live up to expectations? That’s the biggest question of them all, and one that won’t be getting answered until May 24 of next year.