We had the Rise of the Planet of the Apes and then the Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and next comes the War of the Planet of the Apes, or so says Collider in an article announcing the title for the third movie in the newly rebooted franchise, set for a July 14, 2017 release. It’s a damned good title if getting the attention of your audience is your number one goal (which it is) and it also suggests this is going to be the most action-packed film in the franchise yet, though I don’t know where you go after everything Matt Reeves threw into the last one.
Reeves previously commented on the future of the franchise saying, “The first one is sort of how [Caesar] goes from humble beginnings to becoming a revolutionary… In Dawn, he really rose to occasion of becoming a leader in really challenging and difficult times. The notion of what we’re after with the third is to sort of continue that trajectory and see how he becomes a seminal figure in ape history. He almost becomes sort of like an ape Moses. A mythic status… We’re trying to play out those themes and continue to sort of explore it in this universe. Exploring human nature under the guise of apes.”
Andy Serkis, who stars as the ape Caesar, also commented on the future of the franchise back in Nov. 2014 saying, “It’s very, very early in where we choose to drop anchor in the next film. It could be five years after the event, it could be the night after the events of where we left Dawn so it’s very difficult to know where the story is going right at this moment because it’s being written as we speak. I know that part of the desire for Matt to do this next movie is about continuing the enjoyment of seeing these apes evolve. So I don’t think we’re going to see a situation where we’re jumping… It might be three films, It could be four. It could be five. Who knows? But the journey will continue. It might not necessarily be summarized or completely fulfilled in this next one. The point being, eventually we know that we’re going to end up back at The Planet of the Apes, but whether it’s this film or not, I don’t know.”
That doesn’t give us much, but Collider does add their own share of speculation noting how Gary Oldman‘s character in the last film told Malcolm (Jason Clarke) that the military was on their way during the ape uprising. Considering the military never actually arrives in the film, this could be the next step, though I think it would be even more interesting to begin the next film several years after any confrontation with the military and, in fact, feature a film on the cusp of what we end up seeing in the original Planet of the Apes, where humans are already slaves to the apes rather than just another ape/human confrontation. But hey, that’s just me, I like things to be a little different than the last two films in the same story.
I will say one thing about the title, a Deviant Art user was on top of it late last year when he made the following fake poster.
