Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Blu-ray release will feature a mo-cap version of the movie

We’re still a week away from the theatrical release of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, but director Wes Ball already has a fun idea for the Blu-ray release of the film. While speaking with Ape Nation (via GamesRadar), Ball revealed that he’s working on a special feature for the home-media release which will allow viewers to watch the entire movie without CGI. This means that audiences will get to watch Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes with every actor in their mo-cap suits prior to being transformed into apes by Weta FX.

“I’m doing a little thing for the DVD where you can watch the movie – the entire movie – with the raw dailies,” Ball said. “I’m working on that, where you’ll be able to watch and see both the final [cut] and the raw dailies. You can see how close they get, what they do, and how they stitch everything together. It’s amazing, and you can just sit there and enjoy it.“

Ball continued: “I’ll do some commentary over it with Erik [Winquist], our VFX [supervisor]. I think it’s gonna be great. For geeks like us, it’s gonna be a first. They’ve never seen this kind of thing. Some of the hardest stuff in VFX is how you get CG characters to interact with others. So we have a human girl hugging a CG ape and it’s like, ‘How do you do that?’” We’ve certainly seen plenty of mo-cap footage in behind-the-scenes features from the prior Apes movies, but to see Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes in its entirety in that format? That’s fun.

Our own Chris Bumbray caught an extended preview of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes at CinemaCon in Las Vegas and was impressed, calling the footage “pretty jaw-dropping” and a worthy continuation of the modern trilogy.

Directed by Wes Ball, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes “breathes new life into the global, epic franchise set several generations in the future following Caesar’s reign, in which apes are the dominant species living harmoniously and humans have been reduced to living in the shadows. As a new tyrannical ape leader builds his empire, one young ape undertakes a harrowing journey that will cause him to question all that he has known about the past and to make choices that will define a future for apes and humans alike.” Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes will hit theaters on May 10th.