Unfortunately The Fall Guy flopped last weekend, but this weekend Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes kicked off the 2024 summer movie season with a great start and a potential blockbuster box office smash with a fantastic new chapter.
“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” begins with Caesar’s body lying face down, surrounded by a crowd of mourning chimpanzees, while his dead body is covered with flowers and ritually set on fire. The film then moves to the jungle, where a title tells us it’s “many generations later.” In other words, the story we’ve been watching in the previous three “Apes” films — “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” (2011), “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (2014), and “War for the Planet of the Apes” (2017) — is now ancient franchise history. I’m one of those viewers who will greet this news with a “Thank God.”
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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Budget
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is currently projected to finish between $130-140 million, which is fine, but that could put it in the $400 million range, plus or minus, and it really needs to do more than that. Premium formats are performing better – just not enough to satisfy the demand from enthusiastic viewers – and should help push Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes to at least $50 million this weekend, and after seeing it I think the good buzz will push it to $55 million.
Kingdom should be even more lucrative overseas and could reach $100 million with an opening in all of its markets, but for now I’m expecting closer to $90 million. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this opening number go up or down a bit, but (depending on how I see it) I would be surprised if it doesn’t hold strong weekly and reach at least $250 million and hopefully closer to $300 million.
On the other hand, if previews and pre-sales turn out to be too front-loaded, that could result in a domestic weekend take closer to $45 million, and similar international results would bring it to around $75 million in other markets, leading to a low-end result of around $120 million worldwide.
In that case, I’d expect a final gross closer to $350 million worldwide, which is a much lower performance than expected. So, the closer to $150 million the better, as that’s where the real signs will be that the franchise is ready for a revival and could pull in $500 million or more.
Meanwhile, a performance below $400 million would suggest that Apes is another previously popular franchise for which audiences have waned so much that they can’t expect modern blockbuster results (it took Ghostbusters a few films to get this message across, and it’s still unclear if the lesson has been understood yet).
Not that I expect Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes to flop like Ghostbusters: The Frozen Empire did earlier this year (it’s still under $200 million globally as I’m writing this). The point is, we still haven’t clearly identified where certain legacy franchises stand within broader public awareness and interest, and Apes is one of them.
The key element is usually whether the films tell a good story and leave the audience feeling like they got their money’s worth of entertainment. That’s why Dune: Part Two, Godzilla x Kong and Kung Fu Panda 4 were rewarded and continue to increase their box office tallies. And that’s why I think audiences will reward Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes as well.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes Review
I grew up watching the Planet of the Apes films, TV shows, and animated series (all of which I have on home entertainment, even the cartoons). And I’ve been a huge fan of the modern Planet of the Apes films in particular, as evidenced by my coverage of Edgar Wright and Matt Reeves’ trilogy of films. You can read my previous coverage of the making of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes here, and see my previous interviews with Matt Reeves, Andy Serkis, and Toby Kebbell here. My love for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is on par with my feelings for The Dark Knight, a film that in many ways – including qualitatively – mirrors it, and it’s one of the worst Oscar snubs that the series (and Dawn in particular) wasn’t given a statuette for its revolutionary visual effects, or even nominated for brilliant performances and directing.
So whoever took over and continued the series had a huge hurdle to overcome. Wes Ball’s work on the Maze Runner trilogy won him fans, and the first film in that series stands out. When Ball was announced, I was prepared to take a “wait and see” approach and wish him the best of luck, and I was very happy to hear that another film was on the way.
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However, I was also frankly unsure what to expect from him after Reeves’ powerful work on the series and the brilliant gut-punch that was War for the Planet of the Apes. Ball hadn’t yet demonstrated the broad vision and deep complexity with character arcs that drove the previous modern Apes films, and it wasn’t clear where the story would go now that the main characters and conflicts were all complete.
With Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Ball has taken a giant leap to a higher level of directing and filmmaking, not only because of the franchise pedigree but also because the filmmaker did the impossible – Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is not only a worthy successor to the previous trilogy, but it is a deeply emotional, powerful, complex examination of family, community, faith, and sharing this world together. Not only is it Ball’s best film, but it is just as compelling, resonant, and thrilling as the rest of the films in the modern franchise. Screenwriter Josh Friedman has an awesome resume, including creating/writing Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles series
Here in Kingdom, Friedman takes time to build the worlds and relationships for each setting and his various new characters. The story is an organically-paced combination of the road-trip aspects of War for the Planet of the Apes with the world-building, complex character motivations and conflicts of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and a new set of elements and ideas for the growing tribes and cities formed by various groups of apes who are gradually coming into increasing contact – and conflict – with each other. The cast is all excellent this time around, too (though I won’t deny that I miss Andy Serkis, Karin Konoval, and Terry Notary). Owen Teague has done an admirable job handling lead duties, and he’s given Noah his own sense of personality, suspicion, and perception of his world (which includes a lot of misconceptions), while still embodying Caesar’s essential goodness and intelligence. He’s young, but it’s clear that he’ll grow into his role in the tribe and become a leader. Peter Macon steals every scene as Raka, an orangutan who follows Caesar’s teachings and wants to revive them among new generations, as those teachings are increasingly misunderstood and completely twisted to excuse and enable things Caesar would never have allowed or supported. Macon’s performance is funny, honest, and plants many seeds in the mind and behavior of Teague’s Noah, the payoff always feels earned and often brings the audience at my press screening to applaud.
Freya Allan as Nova/May is an enigma, and neither we nor Noah can be certain of her intentions. Allen gives May such a blend of credibility and cunning that keeps us off-balance and adds a lovely element of conflicting emotions and perceptions, just like Teague/Noah.
Kevin Durand (who you may have seen in the recently released horror film Abigail) is the main antagonist, and while his screen time is relatively limited in the nearly two-and-a-half hour film, he does offer a great personality as a leader who wants to take Caesar’s place as ruler of the apes. His motto is a more fascist approach to “Apes Together Strong.”
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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is also a visual masterpiece, with the WETA team miraculously topping themselves once again. You will easily forget that you are watching CGI, and you will take to heart the reality of the apes as real living characters. The locomotion, the details, the mouth movements when speaking, all of this is wonderfully realized within a much grander depiction of ape civilization than we have ever seen in Planet of the Apes before.
Many fans (myself included) expected Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes to be a quick follow-up to the original 1968 Planet of the Apes story in which human astronauts return to Earth to find mind-blowing changes, since Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes set up much of that story and even tried to introduce one of the main female characters of that story.
However, that is not the case at all. But it turns out that it works better, because making apes intelligent and then taking over the world and successfully wiping out the knowledge and evidence of prior human civilization within a generation or two would have ultimately felt like a rush.
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But don’t worry, dear readers – Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes undoes/”evolves” those previous setup bits with ease and with a nice touch of humor that makes the backstory and details even richer. It’s also the first film in the modern series that ends in a way that directly sets up the next chapter in the Apes saga.
Whether this leads us to a retelling of the classic “astronauts return home” part of the story, or some other unexpected series of events (there are many such moments and revelations in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes), only time will tell.
For now, fans can be happy that Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the sequel we all expected, one that not only moves the series forward but leads to something even greater and more epic. Congratulations to everyone involved, and congratulations to audiences who have summer shows worth the money they pay for entertainment and admission fees at premium screens.
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