It Was Earth All Along In The Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes Super Bowl Trailer

If you hate every chimp you see, from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z, then you'll definitely want to look away from the Super Bowl trailer for "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes." Director Wes Ball's follow-up to the critically acclaimed prequel trilogy picks up long after the fall of the human empire and the reign of Caesar, focusing on new protagonist Noa (Owen Teague) as he finds himself brought into conflict with evolved ape leader Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand).

Enough time has passed on Earth that there's little left of human civilization aside from crumbling, greenery-covered ruins, and the events of the prequel trilogy have been largely lost to time. Noa, for example, has no idea who Caesar is, while to others he's become almost a religious figure. "You're seeing the influence and the evolution of what Caesar left," Durand told Empire earlier this year, explaining that Proximus Caesar is so named because "Caesar" is the highest position in ape society. "And, like in every morsel of human history, there's always some type of tyrant who comes along and scares everyone into believing them."

Meanwhile, we poor humans have been rendered mute and feral generations ago by the same virus that gave the apes their intelligence, and we're being hunted down like animals. On the bright side, we don't have to worry about washing dishes or paying taxes anymore. Maybe the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes isn't so bad.

"Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes" takes place around 300 years after the events of "War for the Planet of the Apes," which ended with Caesar finding a new home for the evolved apes and dying in peace. He left behind a son, Cornelius, so it's possible that "Kingdom" will have some kind of reveal that Noa is descended from Caesar. Let's hope that Ancestry.com survived the apocalypse.

There's still a long time to go before George Taylor, Charlton Heston's wayward astronaut from the original "Planet of the Apes" movie, crash-lands on a strange, ape-dominated world. That movie saw George flung forward around 2000 years, to the end of the 40th century. "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes" is an opportunity to bridge the gap between Caesar's hoped-for ape utopia and the theocratic ape society seen in the original film, which treats humans as badly as humans once treated apes. 

"Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes" arrived in theaters on May 10, 2024.