Those viewers of the opinion that the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise numbers among the more successful revivals in the recent deluge (and if you disagree, feel free to kindly see yourself to the e-door) tend to credit Caesar as the film’s secret weapon. The intelligent chimpanzee provided the films with a human center, ironically enough, conveying his maturation and radicalization through unprecedented motion-capture technology and acting from Andy Serkis. The upcoming War For the Planet of the Apes will form the final chapter of this trilogy, and according to the film’s producer, may hold bad news for Caesar superfans.

The folks at Den of Geek landed a juicy interview with producer Peter Chernin, and though they have yet to run the full article, they’re teasing some key tidbits today. Namely, the Chernin has claimed War For the Planet of the Apes will bring an end to the ongoing story of Caesar. Den of Geek quotes him as saying:

“We made a very conscious decision frankly, when we started thinking about this seven or eight years ago, to look at these three movies as a trilogy in a lot of ways…It was inevitable from the moment apes gained intelligence that apes and humans were going to be on a collision course for what would be the dominant species on Earth. And this movie is the war to resolve that dominance. We've always looked at this as a three-part story. And the appropriate ending of that story is to see which species dominates.”

And though this would bring an end to this narrative thread, of course Chernin had to leave the door open for more movies:

Look, obviously we are somewhat dependent upon the box office gods. We have a whole universe of ape stories that we would like to still be telling. We wanted to complete this conflict in this particular trilogy, but we've got a world of stories left to tell, if the public is gracious enough to ask us to do so.

The franchise goes ape once again on July 14.

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