By The original “Planet of the Apes” franchise ran for five movies before fizzling out, but the writers of this week’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” have far larger plans than that.
Married scribes Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver have been working with films since the 1992 thriller “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”. They followed that up with a number of films, including 1997’s adaptation of the Preston Child novel “The Relic”.
They really broke through in 2011 when they wrote “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” which successfully revived the flagging franchise. They subsequently worked on Matt Reeves’ even more acclaimed follow-ups ‘Dawn’ (as writers/producers) and ‘War’ (as producers only), along with writing work on the first “Jurassic World” and the second and third “Avatar” films.
Now they return as producers of ‘Kingdom’ and, speaking with THR, they were asked how far out are they plotting these movies and how many more we can expect:
JAFFA: “With Kingdom, we really feel like we’ve set the foundation for at least two more movies with these characters. But we’ll see. A lot of it depends on the audience’s reaction, too.”
SILVER: “When you first came up with this idea, the Apes franchise way back, you saw nine movies. We thought, ‘This is crazy ambitious.’ But here we are. We’re at four.”
JAFFA: “I saw nine. I don’t know if we’ll make it to nine. I would love it. We’ve spoken to not just Wes and Josh and [producer] Joe Hartwick Jr., but to Steve Asbell and Scott Aversano at 20th about what these next movies can be.”
Of course, a lot will depend on how successful these films are with the movie reportedly projected to pull in $21-22 million today and $52-55 million for the weekend.
The post “Apes” Planning To Go For Nine Films appeared first on Dark Horizons.
