We are told that War for the Planet of the Apes will conclude the trilogy of films started with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and continued in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, that tells the story of Caesar, the child of a laboratory chimpanzee exposed to an experimental Alzheimer’s treatment, who grows up to become the talking leader of a race of super-apes. The Apes films will continue, but Caesar’s story will not.
Few franchises have had a more successful or impressive reinvention in recent years as Planet of the Apes. The original series, beloved in its day, petered out by the middle of the 1970s, and the first attempt to revive it, in a 2001 film from director Tim Burton, proved disastrous. But the new prequel series, charting the descent of our human world into a planet full of those damn, dirty apes, has breathed new life into the old property. Rise of the Planet of the Apes was a late-summer hit in August 2011, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes outgrossed it three years later. (It made about $30 million more in the U.S. and a whopping $220 million more worldwide.)
We talked about this on my show today. People are hearing weird sounds all over the world, people on the South Plains are seeing strange lights in the night sky. And some listeners even called to say it's evidence of the Mayan prediction coming true!
The National Geographic Channel just released the results of a survey on DOOMSDAY. 27% of us think the Mayan apocalypse prediction will come at least partially true, 41% would rather invest in a bomb shelter than their retirement fund and awesomely, 7% think "Planet of the Apes" could come true in the next 25 years.