The Next Film from ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes’ Director Matt Reeves Is in the Works

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).

So when Reeves announces that he’s begun development on a new project, we sit up and take notice. Today, Variety had the exclusive that Reeves’ production company 6th and Idaho has landed the rights to a script titled Spring Offensive, with Reeves expected to take the helm as director. Though Reeves has committed to a third Apes reboot film, titled War for the Planet of the Apes and slated for a 2017 release, he should still be able to work this mysterious project into his schedule. The item from Variety is perilously short on plot details, but they do reveal that the film is a “smart female-driven political thriller,” and we can never have too many of those. Historically, the political thriller has been a male-dominated genre (with the recent exception of Our Brand is Crisis, though that film, while political, was not especially thrilling), and so it might be nice to see the scales evened an eensy bit.