It’s been nearly five years since the last installment in the Planet of the Apes franchise hit theaters. While another entry has been in development for quite some time, today we have a pretty promising update in the form of key plot details.

According to industry insider Daniel Richtman, the film’s story is expected place “generations” after the death of the last trilogy’s protagonist Caesar.

This is what the apes consider to be their “Bronze Age”. Humans, while rarely seen, are mostly feral and considered equivalent to pests, and multiple subcultures are developing within the society the apes have established for themselves. Now, also according to Richtman, the film will follow several different plot lines and characters that are somewhat related, eventually becoming entwined by the end.

One of the main ape characters in the film will be named Proximus Caesar. While it’s unclear if he’s directly related to the original Caesar, he is one of the civilization’s most powerful leaders. He believes that the key to the apes’ future is past technology used by human beings, buried somewhere beneath the Earth. He enlists the help of several apes, known as “marauders”, including one by the name of Sylva to travel beneath the surface.

Shortly after Proximus and Sylva begin their exploration, they cross paths with one ape village and incidentally destroy it. In the ashes, a young local ape named Noa rises and decides to try and stop Proximus. He teams up with a mysterious human woman named Raka, who may or may not have her own motives.

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Personally, this sounds like a wonderfully fresh direction for the franchise, and I can’t wait to see it come to fruition.

Now, it’s been more than two years since Wes Ball (The Maze Runner trilogy) was announced as the director of the project, a whole month before the Fox-Disney merger was complete. While Ball is still attached, a recent interview also offered fans when filming is set to begin.

The original Planet of the Apes film, based on a novel by French writer Pierre Boulle and starring Charlton Heston, centers on an astronaut who lands on a planet and discovers an advanced ape civilization ruling over primitive humans. In the final, infamous twist, he learns he is actually on Earth, which had suffered an apocalyptic nuclear war.

The movie was a commercial and critical hit upon its 1968 release and spawned numerous sequels and a TV series throughout the 1970s. In 2001, Tim Burton remade the movie as an action-adventure that failed to excite audiences. However, Fox found success again with a reboot trilogy that began with 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, an origin story chronicling how the primates took over that featured envelope-pushing motion-capture technology and a stirring performance by Serkis as the leader of the apes, Caesar.

SOURCE: Daniel RPK