[COLUMN] The Original Planet of the Apes Sequels Were the Last Gasp of a Particular Kind of Franchising | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

The classic Planet of the Apes franchise, running across five films from the original film in 1968 through to Battle for the Planet of the Apes in 1973, is a fascinating snapshot of how film franchises used to operate.

These days, there’s an assumption of inflation from one film to the next, what Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) described as “escalation” in the closing scene of Batman Begins. The scale, budget and box office of these movies is expected to trend upwards from one film to the next, each subsequent film in the series upping the proverbial ante by adding new characters, bigger set pieces, and increasingly dense mythology. The audience is expected to grow from one film to the next.

Michael Bay’s Transformers cost $145m, but ten years later The Last Knight cost $260m. Iron Man cost $130m, but launched a shared universe that would culminate in Avengers: Endgame, costing $400m. This is a universal trend. Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Jump Street comedies increased in price from $42m to $84.5m between the first and second instalments. The first Happy Death Day cost $4.8m, while the sequel’s budget jumped to $9m.

There are a variety of reasons for this. Returning talent frequently demand higher salaries. The industry in general tends to trend larger from one year to the next, with blockbusters particularly subject to bloat, and this is particularly pronounced within franchises. However, studios generally spend more on later franchise instalments because the expectation is that they are worth more. The goal is to grow the franchise, to extend its reach and popularity from one film to the next.

However, this wasn’t always the case. The trend really began in the 1970s and into the 1980s, with movies like The Godfather, Part II and The Empire Strikes Back. Francis Ford Coppola has claimed that The Godfather, Part II was the first major sequel to include the number in the title and it went on to become the first sequel to win the Best Picture Oscar. However, the trend really kicked into high gear when George Lucas opted to follow Star Wars with The Empire Strikes Back.

Up until that point, sequels and spin-offs were largely seen as cynical ways to wring blood from a proverbial stone. Universal had saturated the market with sequels to its beloved classic monster movies: Dracula’s Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy’s Hand, and so on. While Bride of Frankenstein is now considered one of the best films ever made, the bulk of these movies were forgettable and quickly descended into farce with Abbott and Costello crossovers.

Susan D. Cowie and Tom Johnson have argued that the studio’s Mummy franchise, for example, was “ground out by the Universal horror factory as effortlessly and as cheaply as possible.” The Mummy cost $196,000 in 1932. Just eight years later, The Mummy’s Hand was budgeted at $80,000. This applied across the industry. In 1931, Dracula cost $341,191.20. Its first sequel, Dracula’s Daughter, would cut the budget to $278,000.

The logic underpinning these decisions was as simple as it was depressing. The goal was to extract maximum financial value from the brand as quickly as possible, hopefully before the audience figured out the scheme. As a result, the expectation was that the audience would shrink from one instalment to the next, as they realized the diminishing returns that were in effect. To help the studio turn a healthy profit, the goal was to cut the budget faster and faster.

The Planet of the Apes franchise is interesting because it stands as one of the last major examples of this trend in action, wrapping up just before the arrival of The Godfather, Part II in 1974 and The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. The original film in the series was a surprisingly prestigious affair. It was based on a best-selling novel by Pierre Boulle, the author of Bridge on the River Kwai. It featured Charlton Heston, a bona fides movie star.

The reviews were positive. Roger Ebert conceded that the film was “much better than [he] expected it to be.” Pauline Kael described it as “one of the most entertaining science-fiction fantasies ever to come out of Hollywood.” The film won an honorary Oscar for its make-up and was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2001. On top of all of that, it also made a lot of money for 20th Century Fox, a studio that was in very dire financial straits towards the end of the decade.

So, naturally, the studio sought to ruthlessly capitalize on that success in the most craven manner imaginable. A sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, was rushed into cinemas in 1970. For the next three years, Fox would release a Planet of the Apes movie like clockwork. It seems safe to acknowledge that none of the sequels aspired to the same level of craft or cultural impact as the original Planet of the Apes.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes is easily one of the most cynical sequels ever made. The production budget dropped from $5.8m on the original film to $3m on the sequel. Heston had to be convinced to reprise his role from the original, insisting that his character be killed off in his first scene. “This is the first film … first acting … I’ve ever done in my life for which I have no enthusiasm,” Heston wrote of the experience in his diary, “which is a vital loss.”

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that Heston collaborated with studio head Richard D. Zanuck on a plot to kill the Planet of the Apes franchise with its first sequel. The movie would close with the detonation of a doomsday device that would destroy the entire planet, and theoretically render it impossible to make a sequel. It was a bold and passive aggressive choice, foreshadowing the contempt that would bubble through later Fox sequels like Alien: Covenant.

However, the wheels of capitalism keep on churning. Beneath the Planet of the Apes was a massive financial success at a time when the studio needed a hit. In December 1970, Richard Zanuck would be ousted from Fox, in part through the machinations of his father Darryl, who would be forced to resign a few months later. Famously, in response to the success of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Fox would send a terse four-word telegram to writer Paul Dehn: “Apes exist. Sequel required.”

If Beneath the Planet of the Apes demonstrated the limits of this race-to-the-bottom approach to franchise maintenance, then Escape from the Planet of the Apes offered a best-case scenario. It is an understatement to suggest that the odds were stacked against Escape from the Planet of the Apes. The budget was slashed again from $3m to $2.5m. The big movie star at the center of the first two films was long gone. Most challengingly, the eponymous planet no longer even existed.

However, despite all of these problems, Escape from the Planet of the Apes was a massive creative success. Variety’s review contended that the film was “an excellent film, almost as good as the original.” Modern reviews and retrospectives tend to celebrate Escape from the Planet of the Apes as “the best sequel of the bunch” and “the best sequel in the original Apes series.” Of the four direct sequels to Planet of the Apes, it has easily aged the best.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes hasn’t aged well despite the limitations imposed on the film. Instead, it is the best sequel in the original run because of the challenges woven into its basic structure. With the destruction of Earth, the departure of Heston, and the cuts to the budget, Escape from the Planet of the Apes has no choice but to make a big swing. The production team no longer has the budget to build a futuristic ape society. However, they can shoot on location in Los Angeles.

So, Escape from the Planet of the Apes makes the big swing of embracing a contemporary setting, imagining that chimpanzees Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), Zira (Kim Hunter) and Milo (Sal Mineo) escaped the destruction of their planet and travelled backwards through the rift that had brought Taylor (Heston) into their world. As a result, these visitors land in 1970s California, where they are embraced as celebrities and come to represent an existential risk to the established order.

That plot summary is completely insane. It’s impossible to imagine any modern blockbuster making a choice so fundamentally counter-intuitive. Disney would never permit a low-budget Star Wars sequel in which Luke (Mark Hamill) journeys through contemporary Los Angeles. James Gunn attempted something like that in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, but that was a streaming curiosity rather than a theatrical release.

Escape from the Planet of the Apes embraces an endearing lo-fi charm, engaging in very broad social commentary about contemporary issues while also foregrounding how the franchise’s core themes resonated in the America of the era. It’s a movie in which the villain (Eric Braeden) repeatedly shoots a baby at the climax, blood splatter on the blanket wrapped around the child. It takes wild tonal shifts, pivoting from broad comedy to character drama in the space of individual scenes.

To put it simply, Escape from the Planet of the Apes is the kind of movie that only really gets made because nobody is paying any serious attention to it. It’s a counterpoint to something like Beneath the Planet of the Apes, a movie beholden to the original. Modern franchises are devoted to making the more expensive and hopefully better version of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, but the modern franchise machine leaves no room for true oddities like Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

The final two sequels, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, are even messier movies. They aspire for grander spectacle on a lower budget, and the results are both ambitious and frustrating. In some ways, the more recent prequel trilogy that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes could be seen as an attempt to “do right by” those two films, to take their basic concepts and refine the execution.

The original Planet of the Apes franchise feels like the last gasp of this approach to making a series of popular blockbuster movies, before these sorts of films became more expensive and so more micro-managed. The films are undeniably uneven and disjointed. They are very obviously the work of filmmakers working on absurdly tight budgets and schedules with no greater objective than to get a Planet of the Apes movie in the can. It’s far from a perfect way to make a movie.

Still, the madcap energy of these original films, and their status as relics of a bygone age, makes them oddly charming. They don’t make them like this anymore. In the case of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, that is a good thing. However, it’s hard not to wish for a little more Escape from the Planet of the Apes energy from modern blockbusters.