10 Awesome Versions Of Movie Sequels We All Wanted

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.

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.