Matt Reeves, who's currently preparing The Batman, revealed his ideal plans for future Apes prequels. The director intends to build on the changes that were introduced in the first installment, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and make future movies that have their own story while maintaining a connection to the original franchise.
Reeves: In the original, obviously, there was like 5,000 years of evolution that occurred after a nuclear holocaust and that’s what enabled the apes to reach this level of evolution. In this one, the idea was that the timeline was changed radically, and yet the originals are sort of a trajectory. And it’s like they’re in the same universe and they vibrate up against each other narratively.
Reeves: When [co-writer] Mark [Bomback] and I came up with the idea for Bad Ape in War, that was to imply the idea that there would be apes out there in the world that Caesar and his apes knew nothing of, and that they wouldn’t have had the benefit of Caesar’s leadership and the values that he had instilled in his community.
That future conflicts in this kind of epic journey that takes us toward the ‘68 movie without necessarily ever getting there could be about conflicts between apes, not just conflicts between humans and apes. And so, to me there are many more exciting stories to be told, and I would love to tell those stories.