Last year, we first heard word a new video game set in the modern Planet of the Apes cinematic timeline would be coming out in conjunction with War for the Planet of the Apes. The movie's release came and went, and there was nary a whisper about this video game. Today, Andy Serkis's Imaginarium Studios finally revealed what it had been working on for the past year. Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier will be a cinematic adventure game that delves into the war between humans and apes during the years between Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes.
After teasing fans at last year's San Diego Comic-Con with an empty vinyl record of the Dazzler album featured in X-Men: Apocalypse, this year Fox Home Entertainment is delivering the goods. While a Dazzler record is still not a thing we'll actually be able to buy and listen to, Fox is bringing a collection of limited vinyls from Deadpool, Logan, the Planet of the Apes franchise, and Kingsman to Comic-Con. To make these packages even more impressive, they'll also come with the Blu-ray and DVD copies of the feature films.
In some film circles, it’s fashionable to dump on studio-made pictures as hollow money-makers, devoid of intrinsic artistic merit and existing only to fatten the pockets of corporate executives heading the companies that finance them. This is an extremely uncharitable and patently unfair stance to take, and nobody proves that more amply than Matt Reeves. (Except for maybe Magic Mike XXL, clearly the greatest American studio film of the millennium.) Reeves has been able to carve out his own corner of the studio system, filling it with innovatively staged creature features (Cloverfield), remakes of foreign genre standouts (Let Me In, a rework of Swedish vampire romance Let the Right One In), and most recently, a blockbuster with more smarts and character than the vast majority of features that slink through neighborhood cineplexes (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes).
Here’s how fast motion-capture technology is evolving: On Rise of the Planet of the Apes, all the motion-capture work had to be completed after principal photography had been completed, but on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, just a few years later, the ape actors shot alongside the human actors on set, even in exterior locations. That’s just one of the facts packed into the latest episode of You Think You Know Movies, which gets into some serious monkey business with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes!
The title of the third film in the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise has been revealed and it shouldn’t surprise anyone who watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Since the previous film concluded with the stalemate between Caeser’s tribe and the humans of San Francisco bubbling over into bloodshed, it’s only natural that the follow-up would be titled War of the Planet of the Apes.
James Gunn had a very busy 2014 with the release of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ Marvel’s superhero space opera, which went on to become one of the hugest films of the year. But even though Gunn was preoccupied with Marvel business, that didn’t keep him from seeing a lot of great films besides the one he directed, and the director has finally revealed his favorite films of 2014. Unsurprisingly, ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ is one of them.
Rupert Wyatt admits he was at one point attached to direct the sequel, ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,’ but he and the studio couldn’t come to an agreement on the story. What was Wyatt’s version of the sequel? Wyatt claims he’s never told anyone before, but, ahead, he reveals what his intentions were for the sequel, including a tie-in with the original 1968 movie.
It wasn’t a great year for critics in movies—see ‘Birdman’ (or ‘Chef’ [or ‘Top Five’ (or ‘Big Eyes’)])—but it was a great year for critics at movies. 2014 offered an tremendous variety of fantastic films: big and small; foreign and domestic; mainstream and indie. To anyone who says the overall quality of movies has declined, I call B.S. There are more good movies now than ever before. If you can’t find one, you’re not looking very hard. Take, for instance, these ten instant classics:
We are living in the franchise-heavy film era, which can sometimes feel exhausting (see: ‘Transformers’) or can sometimes be very enjoyable, depending on the product. In television, having a clear endpoint in mind is a good thing (see: ‘Breaking Bad’); meanwhile, studios are now planning their franchises out years in advance. Again, this can be good (Marvel), or, as our own Matt Singer bemoaned, it leads to what he finds to be an unnecessary splitting of the final chapter to extend the life of a franchise. It’s refreshing, then, to know that some studios are playing things a little looser with their franchises, like hearing Andy Serkis say that he just isn’t sure how many ‘Planet of the Apes’ movies there will be.