Do you find that Planet Of The Apes, its four movie sequels, movie remake, TV series, cartoon show and books haven’t left you satisfied?

Do you often get irritated because, even though you could literally drown in all the different versions of Planet Of The Apes that have been made over the years, nobody’s ever bothered to tell you what happened on the planet almost 2,000 years before the events of the original movie?

If you do, we have two pieces of advice for you – 1) hold onto your hat, because Fox is apparently very close to starting production on that exact Planet Of The Apes prequel, entitled Genesis: Apes, set 1,969 years before the original movie, and 2) stop wasting your life, you friendless nincompoop.

Aside from inexplicably continuing to give Vin Diesel work, Hollywood loves nothing more than overloading a hot trend until its wheels fall off. And the hottest trend of the moment would appear to be the utterly needless prequel.

Looking at the production schedules, we can see that there’s a Wolverine prequel coming out soon, plus a Star Trek prequel, the prequel to Lord Of The Rings and a Terminator movie that’s a sort of prequel but not really. But that’s nothing, because there’s a Planet Of The Apes prequel coming out, and if you judge a prequel’s quality on the space of time between the setting of the prequel and the original, then it’s going to be the best prequel ever made.

The original Planet Of The Apes was set in the year 3978, but if you want to trace back to the exact moment which set off the chain of events that ended up with Charlton Heston wailing around on his knees like a sandy bellend, you need to go back 1,969 years to – oh, this is a coincidence – 2009.

That’s apparently the plot of new Planet Of The Apes prequel Genesis: Apes. And to prove we’re not making any of this up, here’s a quote about it from Fox’s Tom Rothman, as found on CHUD:

We are very close at Fox on a new Apes script- this one a kind of prequel story before the first story, with a return to the social thematics that mark the first one, but with an entirely contemporary setting – Earth 2009.

So, just to make this clear, the new Planet Of The Apes sequel won’t be set on the ape planet as we know it, nor will it feature very many clever monkeys. Maybe there’ll be a chimpanzee with a metal colander on its head who can talk through a machine, but apart from that there’ll be a bunch of grumpy humans listening to Katy Perry and not much else.

Who knows why Planet Of The Apes is getting this prequel. Maybe it’s because strong sales of Planet Of The Apes DVDs proves that demand for the new movie is there. Or maybe someone at Fox is friends with Tim Burton and deliberately wants to make a Planet Of The Apes movie that’ll make Tim’s 2001 remake look less crap in comparison. Or maybe people just think they’ll get rich if they cynically knock out a massively unnecessary Planet Of The Apes prequel without putting much thought in.

Let’s hope the last one isn’t the case, because if Genesis: Apes is successful then we’re going to be overloaded with prequels set thousands of years before the original. And a trend that logically concludes with a Four Christmases prequel where Vince Vaughn‘s great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandfather hits Reese Witherpoon‘s great great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandmother over the head with a club and then insincerely marvels at the invention of fire is not a good trend at all.

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