20th Century Fox surprised us all last summer with the dramatic, exciting and emotionally fulfilling RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, a prequel that defied expectations and turned out to be one of the year’s best popcorn pictures. Now they face a challenge even bigger than crafting an intelligent prequel to a beloved sci-fi classic: the follow-up.
As announced earlier this year, Fox has committed to director Rupert Wyatt, actor Andy Serkis and screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver to bring us DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, which has a release date of MAY 23, 2014. The pressure is on this crew to up the ante and, presumably, really delve into the transformation of Earth as we know it into the Planet of the Apes.
Fans of the original franchise are likely wondering if time travel will factor in at all, as it was quite an important component in the first films. Speaking to Total Film (via Comic Book Movie.com), Jaffa explains why it’s not in the cards:
“I don’t foresee that. But it’s interesting you should ask that, because it’s the one big element that we made a conscious decision not to explore in the first one, and we were worried that there might be some backlash in the science fiction community because of it. When the story first came together we were very, very excited, and yet before we pitched it, I thought, ‘The one thing missing though is time travel. But it’s not necessary for this particular telling’. And I don’t really foresee it, to tell you the truth.”
Personally, I have to agree with Jaffa; the whole point of rebooting the series was to show us how the Planet of the Apes came to be, hence it would defeat the purpose to do any extreme time leaps now.
RISE star Freida Pinto
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