10 Awesome Versions Of Movie Sequels We All Wanted

8. Oliver Stone's Return Of The Apes

Ghostbusters 3
20th Century Fox

50 years on from the original, Planet of the Apes is one of the longest-running and most audacious film franchises around, right up to the recent, critically adored reboot trilogy.

In the mid-1990s, however, the property had been dormant for some time, and so studio 20th Century Fox enlisted director Oliver Stone - then red-hot off the back of 1994's Natural Born Killers - to revive the series.

Stone's bizarre vision would have cast Arnold Schwarzenegger as a scientist who, in the face of a lethal mutation pandemic (we're talking stillborn babies instantly dying of old age), somehow realises that a defect has been deliberately written into the human genetic code, and he most go back in time to remove it.

Arnie movie twins
Universal Pictures

After travelling backwards in time with the use of a floatation tank, a CD-ROM and some DNA (don't ask us), Schwarzenegger's hero would then arrive in a steampunk war zone dominated by apes. Heaps of graphic violence and battles involving flame-throwing tanks would ensue.

As if all this doesn't sound barking mad enough already, during the development process a Fox executive decreed that the script should also include Arnie teaching the prehistoric apes how to play baseball.

Eventually, Stone left the project, and for a short time James Cameron was attached, allegedly envisioning a more grounded continuation of the original series.

But either of these probably would have been better than the turgid Tim Burton reboot that eventually arrived in 2001.

Contributor
Contributor

Ben Bussey hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.