Return to the Planet of the Apes

The sane majority thought it was all over when Marky Mark came face to face with Ape-raham Lincoln, before then finding himself cornered by the (all-over body) fuzz. Apparently 20th Century Fox sees it differently though, as the word is that Planet of the Apes is heading for another reboot, under the guidance of ex-News Corporation bigwig Peter Chernin.

If we are looking for a movie industry trend to characterise 2010 thus far, it would surely have to be the director-ectomy: a clinical procedure performed by studio executives whereby they remove a troublesome filmmaker whose insistence on maintaining certain standards of story and character has caused an ill-conceived blockbuster to stall. It used to be the case that if a director was shooed out of the door, it was a sign that a project was teetering on the brink of collapse. Now it is more like having a wheel-clamp removed – with that pesky artiste safely out of the way the suits can drive forth, hand the megaphone of destiny to some impressionable young pup who is just happy to be there, and get on with making the movie that they always wanted to make. That being the one that will shift the most Happy Meals. Already this year we have seen how Sony's parting of the ways with Sam Raimi has allowed the fourth Spider-Man film to suddenly lurch forward (albeit in an entirely different direction to that which was originally intended). It seems a similar tale over at Fox too, as a recent directorial departure has somehow served to push the simian saga of Planet of the Apes closer to a Phoenix-like rebirth.

Okay, so if you will excuse a mini ape-date, just to ensure everyone is s(w)inging from the same hymn sheet: following the 2001 version of Planet of the Apes (the first film that IndieMovies can recall as having been referred to by that awful and now ubiquitous term 'reimagining'), Fox was interested in extracting more cash from its franchise without having to deal with any of the stinky mess left on the rug by that Tim Burton-directed Apes-trosity. In early 2008, Scott Frank (screenwriter of Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Minority Report) was engaged to work on the script for what was effectively going to be a Planet of the Apes origin story, with a view to making it his second film as director (following Joseph Gordon-Levitt-starrer The Lookout). Frank's script was apparently entitled Caesar - that being the name of the central character in the scenario; a normal ape who is genetically modified by human scientists to possess brilliant intellect, before he uses said intellect to lead his knuckle-dragging brethren in a spectacular overthrow against their captors. Chicken Run with chimps, anyone?

The use of the Caesar name and the revolutionary ape-rising plot line lead to speculation that Frank's movie was a remake of the fourth in the original Apes series, 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (in which Roddy McDowall's Caesar is the only talking ape on Earth, yet he still manages to spark a successful simian rebellion). Yet in January 2008, Frank refuted this suggestion to CHUD, with the erstwhile Oscar-nominee instead making some fanboy-friendly noises about his commitment to telling a hard science fiction story, and telling this story through his characters, rather than 'antic ape action' (which seems rather muddled thinking. If you favour character over antic ape action then Planet of the Apes is probably not your ideal creative arena). However last week the same website reported that Frank was off the project; the story being that his vision for Caesar was too dark and too expensive for the studio bean-counters (the latter surely being the studio executive equivalent of “It's not you baby, it's me”. Like any film that a studio really wanted to make got canned because it was too expensive). A director down, surely this new Planet of the Apes movie was now as far it had ever been from hitting the big-screen, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Just as the frosty demise of Captain Oates lightened the load of the Terra Nova Expedition, so the sharp exit of Frank has supposedly injected fresh pace into Fox's new Apes project. NY Magazine's Vulture reports that Frank's Caesar screenplay has been rewritten by Jamie Moss (who has worked on the script for the forthcoming X-Men: First Class - another major Fox franchise), while The Relic pair of Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver have since completed a dialogue polish. No director is yet attached but the production is ready to forge ahead, with Peter Chernin now sitting in the producer's chair.

Chernin is a new arrival to this current Caesar/Apes reboot, as the Scott Frank-directed version would have been overseen by the screenwriter's friend, producer Scott Rudin, who won an Oscar two years ago for No Country For Old Men. However, according to Vulture, Rudin had no particular affinity to the project and was happy to step aside when his cohort Frank bailed out. Enter Chernin, who up until last year was the exceedingly well-remunerated Darth Vader to Rupert Murdoch's Emperor Palpatine at News Corp. In a previous life (er, I guess as Hayden Christensen, if we continue with the analogy from the previous sentence), when he was chief at Fox Filmed Entertainment, Chernin had already attempted to resuscitate the Planet of the Apes series, with Oliver Stone engaged in the early '90s to work from a script by Mad Max 2 writer Terry Hayes. Now a producer at Fox, Chernin and Apes have found each other once again, and the story is that no film could ever wish for a more powerful fairy godfather than he. Indeed, the deal which took Chernin out of News Corp allegedly saw Fox hand him the authority to steamroller into production a number of projects of his choice - even if the studio top brass hate his ideas as much Glenn Beck hates Obama's health care reforms. Not that he needs to, with Fox reputedly agreeing that a new Planet of the Apes movie is something we should all be ever so excited about. So expect to hear more on this one in the near-future... unless a mortally-wounded Chuck Heston can use his dying breath to trigger a planet-ravaging doomsday device.