Worse Monkey’s Planet the film could have been the best.
Tim BurtonIt’s 2001 Monkey’s Planet It went down in history as one of the worst reboots ever made. (It certainly appears in list of this site of terrible reboots.) The failure of the final product isn’t entirely Burton’s fault; 20th Century Fox spent much of the 1980s and 1990s looking for a way to revive the Monkeys franchise, which was retired after 1973 Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Fox spent countless millions developing and abandoning various concepts for a new Monkey’s Planet before finding one they liked, by William Broyles Jr.
The film he wrote was then fast-tracked for release as Fox’s big release in the summer of 2001 – too quickly, as it turned out, as Burton raced against a near-impossible deadline to finish the project in time to hit that date. He did so, although without much success. From him Monkey’s Planet It opened in theaters on schedule, but was a total mess, with Mark Wahlberg playing a grumpy human astronaut who ventures into a black hole to rescue a fellow chimp from his crew and ends up on an alien world populated by hyper-intelligent apes.
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This is the Monkey’s Planet revival we had. The failure of Burton’s film set the franchise back a decade; it was another ten years before the series was rebooted again, this time much more successfully with a prequel concept that charted the Monkey’s Planet‘origins through a trilogy of films featuring motion-captured apes. But the Monkeys The franchise is all about branching paths through time, and here’s one to consider: The series’ entire history over the last 25 years could have been different if Fox had chosen to make one of the first Monkeys drafts they rejected in favor of the Broyles concept they ultimately produced.
This scrapped draft, titled Return of the Monkeyswas developed in the mid-1990s and led by film-maker Oliver Pedrawho was hired to produce a radically different take on the franchise that was intriguing enough to reach Arnold Schwarzenegger – then at the absolute height of his Hollywood star power – in his leading human role.
It was a totally different view of a Monkeys concept than anything made by Fox before or since and that alone makes it one of the most intriguing unproduced screenplays of the 1990s. If you want, you can find copies of Return of the Monkeys online. If you just want the tl; dr, here are the highlights.
The best Monkey’s Planet Film that was never made
In the mid-1990s, Oliver Stone signed on to produce a Monkey’s Planet reboot that would have starred Arnold Schwarzenegger. Although it was never made, the script for this Return of the Monkeys exists online – and it’s a wild read.
Despite the Statue of Liberty’s weird callbacks, the rest Return of the Monkeys it’s fun. It looks like an epic summer blockbuster. But Fox executives were reportedly uncertain about Hayes and Stone’s approach and went in a different direction.
The next attempt to Monkey’s Planet the revival came from Sam Hamm, the co-writer of Tim Burton Bat Man. His script began with the same basic inciting incident as Return of the Monkeys – a deadly virus that threatens to wipe out humanity – but using it to begin with would be a modern reimagining of the original Monkey’s Planet tale, with astronauts venturing into deep space and finding a planet populated by glowing monkeys, including new versions of iconic characters like Dr. Zaius, Zira and Cornelius. Not long after that, William Broyles Jr. wrote his draft and Burton himself became involved. The rest is history.
What I love about Monkey’s Planet as a franchise, this is how it undergoes major changes and often reinvents itself from film to film. This is a franchise that destroyed the entire Earth in its first sequel and then found a way to continue it in three more films! The first two Monkeys were set on this bizarre planet (in what we eventually discovered was the distant future of our own world), but the third film was set in present-day America. The fourth took place in a dystopian future where men subjugated apes as slaves. And so on. You never know exactly what to expect from these films in the same way as you do with many other blockbuster series.
Thus, although Stone and Hayes’ concept of Return of the Monkeys was certainly different from anything that came before, doing something that was different from anything that came before would be very much in keeping with the Monkeys saga, at least in the spiritual sense. The end result may have been as uneven as Tim Burton’s Monkey’s Planet turned out to be – but with Arnold Schwarzenegger versus steampunk monkeys, there’s no way, it would have been so boring.
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