Stories from the set

The film's action takes place approximately 300 years after the events of Matt Reeves's sci-fi action film War for the Planet of the Apes (2017).

In a government bunker, the apes discover a doll that says the word "mama" — just like the doll that Charlton Heston's character found in the sci-fi film Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1967), and this lends weight and credibility to the theory that humans were once the dominant life form.

As soon as he was cast as Noa, Owen Teague began studying apes at a sanctuary in Florida. He started with chimpanzees, figuring out how the animals spend their time and how they move. He was especially drawn to a chimpanzee named Bentley. According to Teague, it was Bentley who helped him develop the character of Noa, which he then brought to the screen.

While working on the action scenes of the human hunt on the river, the filmmakers used a technique that had previously been used in James Cameron's sci-fi action film Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). They needed the interaction of the computer-generated ape characters with the water to look as realistic as possible on screen.