The recent Planet Of The Apes prequels have astonished everyone by not only being quite good, but really good; like, maybe even surpassing the iconic original, Charlton Heston punching a beach because he hates the Statue Of Liberty and everything. Rather than going for a straight reboot and trying to match that twist ending (as Tim Burton had already tried and failed to do), Fox very smartly went down the prequel route instead, deciding to show how Earth came to be ruled by chimps and humans were mostly extinct. The story of Caesar, the first intelligent ape, has been told with aplomb across Rise and Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, with some genuinely affecting performances and effective political commentary. Which all could have been very different if Oliver Stone had got there first. In the mid-nineties, fresh off the success of Natural Born Killers, the renegade director and crackpot conspiracy theorist signed up to develop an Apes prequel which would have taken a very, very different direction to the relatively straight-laced films we've seen recently. The proposed title was Return of the Apes and the star in line as the hero? None other than Arnold Schwarzenegger whom, even now when he's pretty much fluent, would have had a hard time articulating some of the more esoteric elements of Stone, Jane Hamsher and Mad Max writer Terry Hayes's screenplay. Okay so this one might not have been good, and it's technically a prequel not a sequel, but it sounds so amazingly insane we really, really wanna see it. Unfortunately it's unlikely Fox will ever abandon the realistic Apes prequel series its set up in favour of a movie about "cryogenically frozen Vedic Apes who held the secret numeric codes to the Bible that foretold the end of civilization" and included characters named after Lord Of The Rings characters, time travelling viruses, and Arnie coaching a baseball team of monkeys. Can you imagine? Well, sadly, you'll just have to.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
