Bad Ape Sets Up War of Planet of Apes Sequels

Writer and director Matt Reeves reveals how Bad Ape (Steve Zahn) sets up the future story for the Apes franchise after this summer's whose portrayal of the Ape leader, Caesar, has emerged as the beating heart at the center of this unexpectedly compelling film trilogy.

Picking up several years after the events of 2014's Dawn, War for the Planet of the Apes follows Caesar (Serkis) and the rest of his Ape followers as Caesar and co. will come into with several new characters, who not only have a role to play in the film's central conflict, but who bring new shades and dimensions to the internal conflict that's been raging inside of Caesar ever since 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

The film hasn't even hit theaters yet either, and already one of those new characters - Steve Zahn's Bad Ape - has emerged as a standout in War. Revealed in a small clip from the film several weeks ago , War director Matt Reeves discussed how and why Bad Ape represents the beginning of a new story that could be told in the next Apes films after War:

“Bad Ape is actually a seed that is a forest. In this story we see that the idea is that the world is revealed to be much larger than the apes ever imagined. There are apes who grew up without the benefit of Caesar’s leadership and they might not just be pockets of one or two, there might be actually colonies, and might that be where future conflicts come for Caesar’s apes? They have the benefit of the integrity that he’s instilled in them, so what’s going to happen when they encounter others who didn’t have that?"

Obviously, as any well-educated fans are already aware, it's known where exactly Earth will end up thousands of years after the events of Rise, Dawn, and War, when the entire planet has been taken over and transformed by the apes themselves in the 1968 original film. So while there has never really been much of a potential to see Caesar and the other characters from this franchise interact with the apes and humans in the original Apes, the trilogy has managed to provide an enthralling and emotional story of how and why Earth became that way in the first place.

Neither Matt Reeves nor Andy Serkis have been shy about calling War for the Planet of the Apes the film that concludes Caesar's story once and for all, which means that whatever films 20th Century Fox makes in this world moving forwards, will be completely Caesar-free. That's a simultaneously exciting and terrifying thought to consider, since Caesar has been at the center of every one of the films in this trilogy, and because of that, it makes creating another set of characters as interesting as him that much harder. But as Reeves confirms here, whatever future films do end up coming, will at least have a nice blueprint and foundation to build off of following War.