There's 'a lot of story to tell' in the Apes franchise before Charlton Heston original

Watch: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes director discusses franchise future

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes may be the fourth film in the franchise's reboot film series but there's still plenty of time before the prequels catch up to the 1968 original, director Wes Ball reassures Yahoo.

The franchise was brought back in 2011 with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which began to explain how monkeys came to be the dominant species on Earth and humans lost their ability to speak, as seen in the original film starring Charlton Heston.

In the 2024 film, the story jumps several generations ahead of Andy Serkis' Caesar and Earth is beginning to look a lot closer to a jungle than the metropolis we know it as, but even so Ball says there's still a ways to go before the franchise even touches on the events of the 1968 classic.

"I don't think we're close, I think we've got a long road ahead of us. It's 2000 years that range, or something close to that, so we've got a long time before that thing happens," Ball says.

"We've got a lot of story to tell before that, we've still have to blow up the Statue of Liberty. We've still got to erase almost all signs of humanity, we've got to get apes to the decide to erase all concept, all knowledge, of what humans were for some reason, right?

"There's so much great stuff to explore, I think, before we even get to that Charlton Heston coming down from space —and obviously we know that space is crucially important to all this."

Ball went on: "There's plenty of things for us that we've got in our minds of what we can do there, [I'm] looking forward to it."

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes focuses on a young ape named Noa (Owen Teague), who embarks on a quest to save his clan when they're captured by rising dictator Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand) and joins forces with a human named Mae (Freya Allan).

Ball says there is hope for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes to spawn a whole new series of films, as he said if it is successful at the box office then there are already ideas for where the story can go next.

"We've got ideas where we want to go with this thing," Ball admits. "We've been talking about it for years now, this movie, and where ultimately we want to go and and setting up things subtly that we think we can pay off in the future movies.

"There's plenty of stuff to do there, so we're excited and hopeful that we can continue on with this series and contribute something to this crazy franchise that's lasted for so long."

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is out now in cinemas.