13 Planet Of The Apes Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

2. Oliver Stone Nearly Remade The Series In The 90s

Prior to Tim Burton's visually elaborate/narratively bland Planet of the Apes (2001), the first remake suggestion came, surprisingly, from Oliver Stone (as mooted producer) in the early 1990s: "What if time was not linear but circular," he expanded on Paul Dehn's temporal sleight-of-hand, "and there was no difference between the past and the future€ and what if there were discovered cryogenically frozen Vedic Apes who held the secret numeric codes to the Bible that foretold the end of civilisation?" As elaborate conspiracy theories go, it takes some beating. Stone described the original POTA cycle as "awful", but it didn't stop him enlisting Terry Hayes, co-screenwriter of Mad Max 2 (1981), to develop a screenplay. 20th-Century Fox chairman Peter Chernin called it "one of the best scripts I ever read," but it's hard to see why. It starts with a grotesque if confusing concept: babies are being stillborn from 'old age'; a scientific researcher into mitochondrial DNA adjusts his own to somehow transport him to the dawn of evolution, where the syndrome is rooted. In a primitive world folkloric allusions come thick and fast - Aragorn from The Lord Of The Rings and Ma-Gog from The Old Testament are participants. But the carefully-drawn ape society of POTA is entirely absent, and even Zira ('Dr Zora') is a butchering gorilla (not chimp) surgeon. Unsurprisingly, the screenplay never got close to production.