In 2019, after his three Maze Runner films grossed nearly $1 billion on a $156 million spend, Ball was days away from production on 20th Century Fox’s Mouse Guard adaptation, but then the Disney-Fox merger abruptly canceled his ambitious mocap-centric project that counted Reeves and Serkis as producer and actor, respectively. However, later that year, Ball got a call from 20th’s longtime president of production, Emma Watts, which he believes was her way to make amends for Mouse Guard’s collapse. 　　“Yeah, that’s probably what it was … Emma Watts called me and said, ‘Sorry about the Mouse Guard thing, but what would you do with the next Planet of the Apes?’” Ball tells The Hollywood Reporter. “So it took me a minute to get my head around that idea. I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do until we found our way into something that I thought was worthy of following up the previous three.” 　　Ball’s way into a new potential trilogy began with the aforementioned time jump where different clans of apes now reside in their own villages, including the Eagle Clan and their sheltered yet serene existence alongside their loyal eagle companions. Noa (Owen Teague), a sensitive young chimpanzee, is on the verge of adulthood within the Eagle Clan when Proximus Caesar’s (Kevin Durand) coastal clan of hostile apes pillages his family’s community, forcing him to go on a journey where he finally learns about the real world and who the real Caesar was from the learned orangutan, Raka (Peter Macon), and who he wasn’t from the power-hungry bonobo, Proximus. 　　The kicker is that Noa also encounters a seemingly feral human, but she’s really an intelligent young woman named Mae (Freya Allan), establishing that this new potential trilogy won’t be an ape story that resets its human cast with each movie like the prior trilogy of the 2010s.