New Planet of the Apes movie could start shooting this summer

The Planet of the Apes franchise is one of my absolute favourites. From the ground-breaking original film up to The War for the Planet of the Apes, it’s all great in my opinion; hell, I’ve even got the short-lived Planet of the Apes TV series sitting on my shelf. Needless to say, I’m quite excited by the new Planet of the Apes movie set to be directed by The Maze Runner‘s Wes Ball.

It was first announced that Wes Ball would be tackling a new Planet of the Apes movie back in 2019 but it’s been a while since we’ve heard much about the project. While speaking with THR, 20th Century Studios president Steve Asbell dropped a brief update about the film, saying that they’re “expecting a draft very shortly” and that they hope to go into production by “the late summer, early fall.” It’s not much, but I’ll take it. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the new Planet of the Apes movie will actually start shooting later this year, but it’s good to know that the project is still in active development. I need my Apes fix!

Wes Ball has previously said that although the new Planet of the Apes movie will be charting its own course, it will still honour the original films, particularly the more recent trilogy of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and War for the Planet of the Apes.

Those last three movies are one of the great trilogies we have in modern movie history. They are just so well done. They honored the original movies they sprang from, the Charlton Heston movies, but they grounded it in a modern sensibility and it just worked. Caesar is one of the great movie characters that we’ll have throughout time. So what do you do to follow that up, right? At the same time, I wasn’t interested in doing a part four either. We want to also do our own thing.

Ball continued, saying that they “have a way of staying in the universe that was created before us, but we’re also opening ourselves up in being able to do some really cool new stuff.” Bring on the Apes!