Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Eyeing $130M+ Opening Weekend

The Planet of the Apes franchise is returning to theaters this weekend, with the first new film in the series since Matt Reeves completed the Caesar trilogy in 2017. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, from director Wes Ball, picks up the story hundreds of years after Caesar’s rule. That changing of the guard, however, doesn’t look like it will have a major impact on the film’s performance at the box office. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is eyeing an opening weekend in the same realm as War for the Planet of the Apes.

According to the latest projections from Deadline, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is looking at a $50M+ debut in North America this weekend, and a worldwide haul of over $130M. That puts it just behind the $56.2M opening of War for the Planet of the Apes, which arrived on the heels of the franchise’s biggest hit (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes). Kingdom pulling a similar total out of the gate would definitely be a win.

New Planet of the Apes Trilogy?

If all goes according to plan, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes could launch a new trilogy within the long-running franchise. The chances of that, of course, hinge on how well the film performs in theaters.

Ahead of Kingdom‘s debut, Ball talked with ComicBook about how the story could unfold into a three-film set.

“It’ll take as long as it takes,” Ball revealed. “Fortunately because this franchise is important to the studio we’ll get it right like we did this one, took our time and got it right. Hopefully, people think that…It takes time, the development itself and my big thing is I do not want to go into prep when the script is not done. I’ve had to do that in the past. Nothing good comes from that. That’s one of the biggest things that movies could be doing right now is to stop doing that. We’d save a ton of money… I think on this one that we are in a good, good shape. Fortunately, we were thinking a lot about these questions when we were developing this script, so we have an idea where we wanna go and there’s lots of room for great drama. Literally doors have opened at the end of this movie that hopefully reveal a much larger world that we get to explore in this movie, full of drama, full of conflict, all that kind of stuff. Fingers crossed. We’ll see.”