Regrettably, I have not yet seen Rupert Wyatt’s RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, although I’m gonna get my stinking paws on a ticket in the near future. Thanks to a surprisingly robust opening weekend and crops of good reviews, it looks as though the film will have serious staying power and almost certainly bring about a follow-up.
Director Rupert Wyatt has certainly been thinking about what to do with a sequel, and he spoke to Bleeding Cool about them.
“There’s so much we could do… The ideas I’ve had are all sorts of things, ranging from Full Metal Jacket with apes… you could start this story again eight years from where we left off, the next generation of apes, those that have come from our protagonists, perhaps going in to a conflict with humans and showing real fear, in the same way as going into war for young soldiers in this day and age, telling their story. Or how apes are taking over cities, and being moved into human environments and having to interact with them and deal with things that are part of our culture and understand and evolve through them. Spies that are in the employ of the apes, working against humans and humans maybe existing underground, because that’s a way they can avoid the virus, coming up above ground wearing gas masks, and maybe that’s what dehumanises them.”
Pretty interesting stuff, and absolutely not the run-of-the-mill sequel nonsense we’re used to seeing. Will Wyatt’s ideas get taken into consideration? Will he even end up directing the sequel – if it indeed gets the greenlight? We’ll have to wait and see.
Freida Pinto