It was Mark Wahlberg himself who supposedly said, when asked if he would consider starring in a sequel to Tim Burton's remake of Planet of the Apes: "I'd rather jump out a window." The 2001 film was a big misfire which watered down the original's nihilism in favour of a misguided Hollywood action tone. Instead of the original's fable-like quality – brought about in part by the rather dodgy (though it was groundbreaking at the time) monkey makeup – we got superb but strangely soulless modern prosthetics. Where the original had some intelligent things to say about prejudice, racial stereotyping and our treatment of animals, Burton's version seemed to lose the brainy stuff amidst all the fighting and explosions.

But at least, we all thought, that was that. The original Planet of the Apes series ran to five films, with increasingly poor returns each time. The "reimagining" would halt at one. Not so. As revealed this week in the trades, Fox has announced plans for a prequel to be titled Rise of the Apes. The film will not be based on any of the movies in the original series, though it will half-inch some of their ideas.

Rise of the Apes centres on a scientist in modern-day San Francisco (James Franco) working on a cure for Alzheimer's by testing on simians. When his subject, named Caesar after the chimp that began the original uprising against the humans in 1972's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, begins exhibiting signs of sentience, he takes him home to keep him safe. The film will also star John Lithgow as Franco's Alzheimer's-stricken father, with Slumdog Millionaire's Freida Pinto as a fellow primatologist. There have also been reports that Don Cheadle may have a part to play.

Rupert Wyatt, the British film-maker who made the sharp prison thriller The Escapist, has signed on to direct, and the CGI apes will be created by Weta Workshop, who worked on The Lord of the Rings trilogy among other ventures, so all in all the project looks like a relatively classy one. The problem is, nobody needs a Planet of the Apes prequel.

For a start, the original film's rather confusing denouement appeared to specifically set up a sequel, with Mark Wahlberg's spaceman returning to 22nd-century Earth, only to find a statue of General Tim Roth-in-a-monkey-suit waiting for him, suggesting that the villainous ape had got home first and installed simian tyranny. That film never materialised, allegedly due to Wahlberg's complete lack of interest after Planet of the Apes picked up hideous reviews. Pushing a prequel into production instead suggests that producers want us to forget about the earlier film – so why not cut Rise of the Apes loose from the franchise altogether?

The answer of course, is that without the Planet of the Apes tag, the new film would suffer at the box office. Plus, rather than the action adventure that Fox says it wants, it might end up being a cautionary thinkpiece about the dangers of scientific tinkering, much like the excellent forthcoming Splice, or even Cronenberg's The Fly. As it is, the movie is likely to be a hotchpotch of the two.

There's more. If the studio really desires blockbuster thrills and spills, why take the the storyline all the way back to the lab in the first place? Most 18-year-old cinemagoers will just want to see the bit where the monkeys finally get to take over the asylum – they'll be bored to tears by all the pseudo-scientific hokum which must inevitably precede it, if only to give a class act like Franco the screen time he deserves.

Finally, there's that title. Very few films with similar monikers have ever ended up being anything but terrible. Hannibal Rising. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. I rest my case. To paraphrase the late great Charlton Heston: "Damn them! Damn them all to hell!"