War for the Planet of the Apes

Motion-capture master Andy Serkis talks to us about his ‘Black Panther’ villain, and if he’ll return for the ‘Lord of the Rings’ TV series.

We never found out what happened to Clarke’s Malcolm after ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ - until now.

At the Oscars, genre films usually dominate the special effects categories, sometimes getting a nod or a win for a certain actor or director. Mad Max: Fury Road was the last big genre pic to get in the running for Best Picture, receiving tons of nominations after it awed audiences and critics back in 2015. This year’s race is set to be mighty interesting, as Wonder Woman is rumored to be stirring up an Oscar campaign, and a bunch of genre material by prestige directors is debuting within the next few months during fall film festival season. War for the Planet of the Apes is setting itself up as an unlikely contender, officially launching its huge Oscar campaign today.

What was the best action movie of the summer? The best superhero? The best comedy? We pick those - and lots more.

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.

Why was this summer so much better than last summer? Let’s investigate.

The Internet has made many previously unthinkable wonders possible: I can watch movies without taxing the lower half of my body, aggressively explain to teenagers in the Philippines why they should really be getting into Riverdale, and get food delivered to my house without speaking to another human being. But apart from turning otherwise normal people into reclusive hermits, the great gift of the Internet is the sharing and popularizing of minutiae. When someone online notices something neat-o, they’re free to share it with the rest of the online world, who will in turn mutter, “Huh, that’s neat,” before moving on with their own lives.

What did you see this weekend? Was it the dour World War II epic? The raunchy New Orleans sex comedy? Or the movie where Cara Delevingne shoves her head into a telepathic jellyfish’s butt? Truly, with options like this, anyone who complains about the death of cinema has no idea what they’re talking about. Anyways, here’s the box office numbers through Sunday afternoon:

Who would you rather fight, a million spider-sized ape or one ape-sized spider? It’s a question that’s been haunting my mind since, oh, about an hour ago when I started to look up the box office numbers for this past weekend. And while I might not be any closer to solving my riddle, I can at least say this: when it comes to week-old spiders versus brand new primates, the primates are destined to win. Here’s the box office numbers as of Sunday afternoon:

War for the Planet of the Apes arrives in theaters this week about a year shy of the franchise’s 50th anniversary. Over half a century, Planet of the Apes has had an enormous impact on popular culture. The prosthetic masks for its ape characters set a new standard for Hollywood makeup effects .Several of its most quotable lines of dialogue became ingrained in the pop culture lexicon. Any time someone tells you to take their stinking paws of another person, Planet of the Apes is there.