During this weekend’s big Super Bowl Sunday telecast, 20th Century Studios gave us a new look at Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes with a fresh trailer. The new chapter of the long-running franchise follows the trilogy starring Andy Serkis’ Caesar, and could very well be the start of another trilogy from director Wes Ball, who has shared hopes to build out the storyline across three movies. When CinemaBlend spoke to Kingdom star Owen Teague, the actor shared his thoughts on building out his character to that extent.
CinemaBlend spoke with Owen Teague after joining Wes Ball in Burbank, California (alongside select press) to see footage from Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes as the production on one of the most anticipated 2024 movies continues to go through post-production. After Ball shared his aspirations following the release of the next Apes movie, we asked Teague about potentially leading the next three films from the franchise. In his words:
I would give anything to get to do this trilogy with him. I can't imagine not doing this trilogy with him and hopefully we get to do a trilogy, but he's such a good director and he's a good friend at this point. And, I really love every second of working with him. He's incredible. So I really hope that he decides to do it, if we get that opportunity and obviously I would love nothing more than to do two more of these. I would do six more of these 'cause it was so much fun making the first. Like, I don't care, I'll do this anytime.
After Wes Ball helmed the Maze Runner movies, the director is ready to jump into another high profile trilogy with the Planet of the Apes, and his leading actor is completely on board. Owen Teague plays Noa, a teenage ape who becomes the center of an incredible adventure that will have him developing a relationship with a human and learning more about humanity’s past 300 years after Caesar’s reign. As Teague also continued:
This hopefully trilogy is really exciting to me in terms of the themes because we're starting to get into the territory of the original. Obviously we're still a long way out from [the setting of the original movie] 'cause I mean the original is set in 3000 something, and we're only 300 years after Caesar, which is like 2016 or something. But, you're starting to look at like ape government and how apes are using legends and stories and knowledge to their advantage, meaning like, to the advantage of certain apes coming into power and how you get basically what happened with humans where how you get a clan bigger than 120 chimpanzees… Now, you're starting to see ape dictatorship and ape government and how ape groups interact with each other. Whereas before it was Caesar's apes and humans. And now we're starting to see this whole other world of a species finding the way to building empires.
The Planet of the Apes franchise began with the 1968 movie starring Charlton Heston, where a group of astronauts awaken from a deep hibernation to find themselves crashed on a planet where apes rule the world and have a rather intelligent government and society. The major plot twist of the movie comes at the end when we learn that they’d been on Earth all along and an apocalyptic nuclear war had destroyed humanity.
As Teague shared in our interview, he’s excited to explore and continue to explore the franchise moving closer to the events of the first movie where apes really do rule the whole world and are having dinner parties and so forth with one another. The actor noted there’s a new dynamic to explore with Kingdom that could inspire many more films.
When CinemaBlend got to see footage with Wes Ball, the director also discussed how Andy Serkis was involved in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. You can check out the new movie in theaters on May 10.
