When word first broke that Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt wouldn’t be returning to direct the sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, there was a moment of panic. But now that they’ve announced that Let Me In director Matt Reeves has stepped in to take the job, things have calmed down a bit, and it’s become time for work on the sequel to move forward.
So, what’s the next step? It seems Fox has decided that it’s taking another pass at the script. While a first draft for the film was written by Rise writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, and a second draft was written for Wyatt by Scott Burns (Contagion), now that Wyatt is off of the picture the studio wants to tweak it once again, this time to tailor it to the strengths of Reeves.
In order to get the job done, THR reports that they’ve brought on Mark Bomback, the screenwriter who collaborated with Len Wiseman on Live Free or Die Hard and Total Recall; who wrote Tony Scott’s last film, Unstoppable; and who co-wrote Fox’s upcoming super hero sequel The Wolverine. Of course, what Bomback knows about tailoring a movie to Matt Reeves’ strengths is something of a mystery, but it should be noted that, given his placement on two big Fox properties, the studio must see him as being something of a golden boy these days.
Industry politics aside, it was Jaffa and Silver’s work on the first installment of this new Apes franchise that pleasantly surprised everyone and made this sequel possible, so hopefully all of these additional writers being brought on board hasn’t done too much to lose the focus of their Dawn script. Sure, it’s possible that Bomback could get his hands on this thing and kick it up a few notches, but history has seemed to have shown that the more writing credits a studio piles on top of a feature the less memorable and more disposable it becomes. What do you think? Have all the new faces diminished your enthusiasm for this sequel, or are you still excited to get more Apes any way that you can?