Warning: SPOILERS for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes are ahead!
Marketing a movie is tricky, as you want to share enough footage to entice people to go see said movie, but also not spoil them on any major plot reveals and twists. Well, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (which performed well on its opening weekend) didn’t escape unscathed on that front, because before the movie arrived on the 2024 release schedule, various promos showed that Freya Allan’s Mae, the main human character, could speak, which is a rarity during this era when most humans are mute and feral creatures. However, during my recent conversation with Kingdom producer Rick Jaffa, he explained to me why revealing this twist ahead of time was the “correct” marketing move.
Jaffa and his professional partner/wife, Amanda Silver, who was also part of the interview, go way back with the Planet of the Apes franchise, having come aboard to write and produce 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and then being involved in one form or another on every entry since. So when Silver mentioned how the audience, alongside Owen Teague’s Noa, learn that Mae isn’t feral, I wanted to get the duo’s thoughts on Mae speaking being shared with the public ahead of release, and Jaffa told me:
Well, to their credit, the marketing division at the studio came to us with the idea of doing that, and they had, very, very, good, well-thought-out and backed-up-by-numbers reasons why to do that. But to be honest, we were all thrown, but the way they presented their case with care and thoughtfulness, we thought, ‘Ok, let’s go for it.’ But that is the big twist. So it concerned us but I think the marketing teams prove themselves to be correct.
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While I may not agree it was the right move from an artistic perspective to spoil Mae speaking, I can get behind Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver deciding it was ok on the marketing side of things. Whatever information was passed along to the producers was evidently enough to convince them that the twist was worth throwing out into the world before Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes opened wide. Perhaps the marketing division figured out more people would check out the movie if they knew that the main human character had dialogue rather than stayed silent the whole time. In any case, Jaffa and Silver were pleased with the end result.
Although initially depicted as one of Earth’s feral humans, Mae reveals her true nature as a speaking, intelligent human when she called out Noa’s name while she was being chased by Sylva, one of Proximus Caesar’s soldiers. As you’ll see in the clip below, Raka initially thinks Noa misheard, and then Mae throws them for a loop by sharing her name and telling Noa she knows where his clan’s being taken.
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Although the presence of William H. Macy’s Trevathan meant that there are occasionally humans in the outside world born with “normal” intelligence, at the end of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Mae traveled to a remote satellite base to deliver a decipher key to a settlement of humans who’ve kept quarantined. These humans presumably descended from ones who went into hiding when the Simian Flu Virus started spreading, but as Rick Jaffa also told me during our interview, “the virus has probably mutated itself out of existence.” Now thanks to the decipher key, this settlement of humans has made contact with another group of intelligent humans elsewhere in the United States, and Jaffa and Silver are looking forward to seeing what happens when these different groups start to connect.
Keep visiting CinemaBlend for more coverage on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. If you’re looking to revisit the past installments, those can all be streamed with a Hulu subscription.