We were excited last year when Minority Report scribe Scott Frank started work on Caesar, a gritty, realistic reboot of classic flick Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes. Now Fox has stalled the project, calling it "too dark."
Over at CHUD, Devin Faraci has the story:
It turns out that Frank has left the project and the future of Caesar remains up in the air at Fox; my guess is that the project goes back on the shelf for the time being. Or rather that it's been on the shelf; my sources indicate that Frank has been off the movie for a little while now.
So what killed Caesar? Exactly what you'd expect from Fox: it was too expensive and seen as too dark.
When the project was announced last year, it sounded too good to be true. Frank, who also wrote reincarnation mindfuck movie Dead Again, planned to do a hard science fiction re-imagining of the prequel to Planet of the Apes, in which the rebel ape Caesar leads the apes against their human slave-drivers - and wins. Frank wanted to make Caesar as realistic as possible, and was going to have him capable of speaking only in sign language. Which is something that apes can already do. He seemed to have a firm grasp on the fact that Planet of the Apes touches on real-life issues brought up by civil rights movements, and wanted to tweak that idea.
Now Caesar is in limbo at best. Frank is definitely off as writer and director, and no new helmers have been named. When will we get a truly awesome animal rebellion movie?
via CHUD