The Sci-Fi Franchise That Arnold Schwarzenegger And Oliver Stone Almost Ruined
by Witney Seibold · /FilmWe may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
The first five "Planet of the Apes" movies were released in theaters from 1968 to 1973, but in those five short years, the franchise went from being a massive success to being ... well, still a modest success. 1973's "Battle for the Planet of the Apes" was quite profitable, but its box office returns were meager compared to those for the 1968 film that started it all. Thus, in 1974, the property moved to television with the 14-episode "Planet of the Apes" TV show. A year after that, the franchise churned on with the 13-episode animated series "Return to the Planet of the Apes." It was only then that the brand took a breather.
In the early 1980s, however, 20th Century Fox decided it was time to start developing a "Planet of the Apes" reboot. The project swiftly entered development hell, passing through various hands and being moved around on back burners for the better part of the next decade. Then, in 1988, screenwriter Adam Rifkin (then only 21) struck a deal with Fox to revive the franchise and pen a follow-up to the 1968 "Planet of the Apes" movie that ignored the other sequels. That film, also called "Return to the Planet of the Apes," was rewritten multiple times before similarly being sent to the chopping block.
Then came the most notorious reboot attempt of them all. "Planet of the Apes" fans might already know about Oliver Stone's attempt to relaunch the franchise with a movie he wanted to call simply "Return of the Apes" in the early 1990s. Stone was to produce the film, Phillip Noyce (whose many credits include the Denzel Washington-led "The Bone Collector") was to direct, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was to star as a scientist who does battle with apes in a long-reaching time-travel plot.
Oliver Stone's Planet of the Apes movie sounds wild
A lot of the details of Stone's potential "Planet of the Apes" movie were covered in the 1998 book "Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture" by Eric Greene, along with a 2001 edition of the magazine "The Planet of the Apes Chronicles." The story goes that Stone hired screenwriter Terry Hayes ("The Road Warrior," "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome," "Dead Calm") to pen the script, and the pair had attracted the attention of Schwarzenegger by mid-1994.
The plot of "Return of the Apes" was twisted and took place across history. Its script began in the near future, wherein humanity was dying out because of an incurable progeria-like plague. Schwarzenegger was to play Will Robinson, a geneticist who discovers that the virus had been somehow artificially implanted in humans back in the Stone Age and was only now activating. Will recruits his friend, a pregnant woman named Bille Rae Diamond, and they travel back in time about 100,000 years to the Paleolithic period to investigate. The time travel device they use to do so is closer to a psychedelic sensory deprivation tank (à la Ken Russell's sci-fi horror movie "Altered States") than an H.G. Wells-style time machine.
Upon arriving, Will and Billie discover that the humans of this primitive era are locked in a war with super-advanced, highly intelligent apes that have already invented steam engines. Will is then captured by the apes and finds a whole ape society at work on Earth. The apes have both a government led by a president and an organized religion led by an angry ape priest. The priest, Magog, hates humans deeply, so the apes have been engineering a virus designed to kill off all of humanity.
Why Oliver Stone's Planet of the Apes movie never happened
"Return of the Apes" ultimately introduces a human child born with an immunity to the ape-made virus. There are also many scenes of Will sneaking around jungles and uniting various human tribes to wage war against the apes. What's more the script includes characters named Aragorn, Magog, Nazgul, and Strider, as well as an area that's referred to as Middle-earth. Clearly, Stone and Co. had been reading a lot of "Lord of the Rings." And unlike other "Apes" movies, "Return of the Apes" was going to feature gorillas exclusively, not chimpanzees or orangutans.
Eventually, it comes to light that Will Robinson is not Will's real name. He's actually Robert Plant, a disgraced scientist who accidentally killed some of his colleagues in a sensory deprivation experiment and had to change his identity in order to keep working, choosing "Will Robinson" because he was (sigh) "lost in space." The fact that Plant shares a name with the guy from Led Zeppelin is, apparently, a coincidence.
As wild as it sounds, Fox reportedly loved Hayes' script and even approached Stan Winston about handling the ape effects. The reason the project fell apart was also rather whimsical. It seems that a Fox producer wanted Hayes to incorporate more comedy into his script, including — by their insistence — a scene where Will teaches some apes how to play baseball. The studio, it seemed, wanted a crowd-pleasing comedy, not a bizarre sci-fi war epic. Hayes hated the idea, though, and turned in a new draft without a baseball scene, resulting in him being fired.
When that happened, Noyce also dropped out, with Stone soon following suit. The project died because of ape baseball. Hollywood is a twisted place.