It’s always good to be top in your field, although Andy Serkis must sometimes wish that for his biggest role his body didn’t have to be covered up by CGI. Having played the likes of Gollum and King Kong, he’s stepping back into the motion capture arena for Fox’s Planet Of The Apes reboot/prequel, Rise Of The Apes.
The studio revealed the news via the Twitter of Chris Petrikin, Foxs VP of Corporate Communications, saying, ‘This is cool: Gollum reteams with Weta. Andy Serkis to star as Caesar in “Rise of the Apes,” portraying chimp who leads the simian revolt.’
He’s certainly a good choice, as he knows his way around Weta and how they do their motion-capture work, and had plenty of monkey training for King Kong. And yes, this does indeed mean that unlike earlier films, this time around the apes will be fully CGI rather than men in suits.
Rise Of The Apes is set at the beginning of the Apes story, with James Franco as a scientist doing work on apes in the hope of finding a cure for Alzheimer’s, which ends up making them super-intelligent. While the scientist tries to help the main ape, Ceasar, eventually it develops into a war for supremacy, which if ealier Apes movies are anything to go by, doesn’t turn out too well for the humans.
The film will hit cinemas on June 24th, 2011, with Rupert Wyatt directing.