11 Unmade Movie Adapatations That Were Just Weird
3. Return Of The Apes
A Planet Of The Apes movie in the vein of either Terminator or The Flintstones almost certainly wouldn’t work. Which is why it’s such a relief that Oliver Stone’s Return Of The Apes, which was a clash of the two ideas, never got out of the starting gate.
With Arnold Schwarzenegger tapped to play the lead role of a geneticist who travels back in time, Return Of The Apes would have been set somewhere in Africa 102,000 years in the past, involved apes with biblical connections, and would have taken a much more gritty and violent approach to the source material. But as is common for a lot of movies, a studio executive stepped in and ordered some changes.
A number of ill-fitting comedic scenes including Schwarzenegger teaching apes to play baseball (which, let’s be honest, would be worth the ticket price) were pitched and writer Terry Hayes was fired for not including them in his final draft, leading to a Fox exec commenting that Hayes wanted the movie to be Terminator, while Fox wanted it to be the Flintstones.
Over time, the people behind Return Of The Apes were either fired or moved onto other projects, and the movie was gradually reworked into another draft by Sam Hamm (Batman), which also never fully entered production. Although Return Of The Apes would have been ridiculous, it would have been amusing to see what could have quite possibly been the most 90s movie reboot of all time.