Wes Ball thinks his next ‘Planet of the Apes’ will be better than the last one

There's no definitive release date for a potential sequel just yet.

By Joe Allen Published February 12, 2025 5:06 PM

An orangutan in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. — 20th Century Studios

There’s more Planet of the Apes movies coming. Following last year’s soft reboot with Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, director Wes Ball said that the next installment in his trilogy was taking shape.

In speaking with Collider, Ball said that the movie wasn’t officially in pre-production yet, but he’s already thinking about how the next movie might top the one he’s already made.

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“Yeah, we’re talking about it. That’s all I can say, really. But I’m greedy. I’ve got multiple things that I’m playing with right now,” he explained. “I’d love to do all of them, but there are so many cool places that we could go with the next one. We have these ideas of where we want it to go. Things are set up in this movie that you don’t even realize are setups. But movie two is almost always the best one of the trilogy. That’s the way it works. That’s where all the drama is, where all the conflict is, and that’s where this really dark stuff happens, or really consequential stuff.”

Ball added that he thinks Noa, the protagonist introduced in the first installment, has been changed pretty profoundly by the events of the film. “And this character of Noa and how much he has changed by the events of this movie, the fact that we set up all these characters and we’ve kind of set this runway for where ultimately we could go, we have in our minds, and it’s super exciting.”

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was surprisingly successful at the box office in 2024, helped no doubt in part by a strong critical reception and word of mouth. While no sequel is official yet, it seems like one is definitely in the works.

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Joe Allen is a freelance culture writer based in upstate New York. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The…

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