Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Director Confirms Movie’s Timeline and Location

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is heading to theaters in May, and it follows the events of the trilogy starring Andy Serkis as Ceaser that came to an end in 2017. The new installment had a trailer drop during the Super Bowl earlier this week, and it’s been confirmed that Serkis won’t be in the film. In fact, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes takes place well after the events of the previous trilogy. Recently, ComicBook.com paid a visit to the film’s edit bay, and director Wes Ball spoke to members of the press about when and where the new movie takes place.

“As I say, it’s a nice little sendoff to all the fans of the previous one,” Ball explained. “And honestly what it’s about, it’s about the birth of a legend. It’s about when that ape [Caesar] died, he became more than just an ape. He became something more. And it’s about that idea. And then we have this cut, ‘Many generations later,’ and I’ll just say it’s hundreds of years later, not thousands, hundreds.”

“We never really put a date on it, to be honest,” he added. “It’s just a long enough distance that stories can, the game of telephone through history, it starts to erode and change and get lost.” 

“It is West Coast,” Ball confirmed of the movie’s location. “Honestly, the big thing for me… you will not see any Statue of Liberty in this movie, but I kind of didn’t want to do the whole… ‘Oh, I know that.’ But I’ll say this. We do think about those things and the people who notice it fishes from LA, we probably notice some things, but the journey is, it’s a journey movie. So we travel quite a lot here. But there is a kind of thing, especially with that first ’68 movie they shot at Malibu. So there’s kind of like a California thing to these movies where they shot on the branch up there. So we kind of wanted to set it there. What’s interesting, even though we had to shoot in Australia, the whole reason we kind of chose that because mainly because when we had to shoot it was winter here and… whatever, that’s a part of movie making, but chose Australia because you go around Los Angeles, there’s a ton of eucalyptus trees everywhere.” 

“And so we kind of picked the more lush versions of Australia, so it actually kind of feels like it’s kind of got the harsh light. And that’s another big thing usually I think in the movie is that we’re not in Vancouver … We’ll see if people like it or not. It creates a different look for the movie where we’re not in the kind of soft light and this steamy smoky terrains and stuff, but we go into hard sunlight … It is bright, it’s a bright movie, it’s a new day.”

Directed by Wes Ball, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes stars Owen Teague (IT), Freya Allan (The Witcher), Kevin Durand (Locke & Key), Peter Macon (Shameless), and William H. Macy (Fargo). The movie opens in theaters on May 10th.