Fantastic Four’s Matt Shakman to Direct New Planet of the Apes Movie

Matt Shakman is heading back to the jungle — or rather, the planet. Fresh off directing The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Shakman has been tapped to helm a brand-new Planet of the Apes movie at 20th Century Studios, with screenwriter Josh Friedman alongside him to develop the script.

Here’s the twist: the new film will not pick up where 2024’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes left off. According to Deadline, which first broke the news, sources say this will be “a new original story that Shakman and Friedman are developing” — though plot details are otherwise being kept tightly under wraps. The one thing we do know is that the film will return to the planet where apes are the dominant species. So the core premise is intact. Everything else is a blank slate.

For fans who were invested in Kingdom’s cliffhanger ending, that’s going to sting a little. Wes Ball’s film earned $397.3 million worldwide on a $160 million budget and landed an 80% on Rotten Tomatoes — numbers that, on paper, look like a sequel greenlight waiting to happen. Ball had reportedly envisioned a full trilogy. But compared to the heights of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and War for the Planet of the Apes, Kingdom was considered an underperformance in relative terms, and that context likely shaped the studio’s thinking here.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that “a sequel to Kingdom was talked about, but it is not clear where things stand with that.” Whether this new Shakman film exists in the same timeline as Kingdom, or carves out an entirely separate one, hasn’t been confirmed.

Why Shakman Makes Sense for This

Shakman earned his blockbuster credentials the hard way. He first broke through with Marvel Studios’ WandaVision on Disney+, earning an Emmy nomination for his directing work on the series. That visibility led to him being attached to a new Star Trek film — a project he ultimately stepped away from when Marvel came calling with Fantastic Four.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps opened last summer to solid reviews and pulled in $521.9 million globally. The film was effects-heavy throughout, which matters enormously for a Planet of the Apes movie — the modern franchise is built on entirely CGI ape characters rendered through motion capture, a technical challenge that demands a director who’s comfortable working in that space.

Beyond Marvel, Shakman has a quietly impressive TV résumé: he helmed pilots for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, The Consultant, Welcome to Chippendales, and The Great starring Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult. Up next, he’ll direct the pilot and finale of Wild Things, starring Jude Law and Andrew Garfield. The man stays busy.

Friedman, meanwhile, has become one of 20th Century Studios’ most trusted writers. In addition to Kingdom and First Steps, he co-wrote both Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash for the studio — which means he has experience working on some of the most technically complex, world-building-heavy franchises in Hollywood.

Where the Franchise Stands

Planet of the Apes is one of the longest-running sci-fi franchises in Hollywood history, stretching back to the 1968 original starring Charlton Heston — based on Pierre Boulle’s 1963 French novel La Planète des singes — which won a special Academy Award and became one of that year’s biggest hits. Four theatrical sequels followed in the early ’70s, then two TV series, then Tim Burton’s divisive 2001 remake with Mark Wahlberg, and then the acclaimed reboot trilogy that began with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011.

That reboot trilogy — anchored by Andy Serkis’s landmark motion-capture performance as Caesar — is widely regarded as one of the better franchise reinventions of the modern era. Kingdom was meant to start a new chapter set generations after Caesar’s time, with an entirely new cast of characters. Whether that chapter continues in any form now seems genuinely uncertain.

In total, this new Shakman film will be the 11th Planet of the Apes movie, adding to a franchise that has collectively earned more than $1.7 billion at the worldwide box office. Producing alongside Shakman are Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, veterans of the modern Apes films, with 20th Century Studios exec VP of production Scott Aversano overseeing for the studio.

There’s no release date yet, no cast, and no official title. But with Shakman and Friedman — the same team behind one of Marvel’s biggest hits — now developing an original story in one of Hollywood’s most enduring sci-fi universes, this one is worth watching closely.