Peter Jackson Reveals Scrapped Planet Of The Apes Reboot Details & Almost Teaming With James Cameron
The most intriguing Planet of the Apes reboot was the one that never happened.
Tim Burton took the first shot at resurrecting the classic film franchise with a 2001 remake of the Charlton Heston original, and though the movie made a respectable $362 million on a budget of $100 million, it failed to launch a new series. It wasn’t until 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes that the franchise received a true relaunch, with three sequels following. Even as Disney reportedly plans a new Apes film unconnected to Rise and its sequels, details are being shared about a previous reboot attempt that never got off the ground despite the involvement of several major names.
A pre-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson was the first major name at one point tapped to be involved in this would-be Planet of the Apes movie, but as the filmmaker relates in a new interview (via IndieWire), his misgivings about his possible collaborators caused him to back away. “Fran [Walsh] and I wrote a treatment for a film that was called “The Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes, where Roddy McDowall would be playing a sort of Leonardo da Vinci type,” Jackson says, teasing what would have been the return of a central player from the OG Apes franchise.
The sticking point for Jackson was the heavyweight team already attached to the project: James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger. With those two in the kitchen, there was just no room for another cook. “It was hard for us to figure out how to put them into our story outline,” Jackson says. “I hadn’t met Jim at that time, so that was kind of serious. I thought, ‘God, I don’t want to direct a movie that has Schwarzenegger and Cameron. I have no power at all.’”
Jackson ultimately passed on the movie to pursue other projects, including two that would become central works in his filmography and in the development of digital VFX and motion-capture, technologies that would later be used to great impact by Rise of the Planet of the Apes and its sequels. “We also had a first look deal with Miramax,” Jackson explains. “We had all these projects, and they were all big effects projects. What were we going to do? I wanted to do King Kong — Kong is my favorite film — but we also wanted to do The Lord of the Rings.”
Leaked details of Cameron’s planned Planet of the Apes film revealed his wish to bring back Heston, with whom he had worked on True Lies, as his original Apes character Taylor. Noted sci-fi director Peter Hyams was Cameron's choice to helm the movie after Jackson bowed out, but 20th Century Fox was unhappy with Hyams and fired him, leading to Cameron and Schwarzenegger also bailing out.