John Lithgow Joins Planet Of The Apes Prequel
By Peter Sciretta/June 22, 2010 7:13 pm EST
Lithgow is a two-time Oscar nominated actor for his supporting performances in Terms of Endearment and The World According to Garp. He has also been nominated for nine Emmys, four of which he won. His role as the villain on last season’s Dexter was one of the most talked about performances in the last year of television.
Previously:
The Apes will be created using CGI by the wonderful tram at WETA Digital, rather than the costumed actors we’ve seen in past installments of the franchise. The press release says that they will employ “certain of the groundbreaking technologies developed for AVATAR” and “will render, for the first time ever in the film series, photo-realistic apes rather than costumed actors.”
RISE OF THE APES (tentative title) is an origin story in the truest sense of the term. Set in present day San Francisco, the film is a reality-based cautionary tale, a science fiction/science fact blend, where man’s own experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.
Fox’s Tom Rothman has said that it is “a kind of prequel story before the first story, with a return to the social thematics that mark the first one, but with an entirely contemporary setting – Earth 2009.” The film won’t have talking monkeys and will not end with chimps taking over Earth. Instead the film will be a hard science fiction film about humans that use science to create hyper-intelligent chimpanzees.
Principal photography is set to begin on July 5th 2010 in British Columbia, and the film has an announced release date of June 24th 2011. Rise of the Apes will hit theaters on June 24th 2011. The prequel/reboot is set to hit theaters on the same day as Pixar’s Cars 2, a week after Green Lantern, and a week before Transformers 3.
source: THR
