Trivia / Rise of the Planet of the Apes

• California Doubling: Inverted — New Zealand for San Francisco.
• The Cast Showoff: John Lithgow really does tickle those ivories.
• Deleted Scene: A scene shows Koba getting used to firearms. Had this been in the film, it would provide Foreshadowing.
• Fake American:
  • English-Canadian David Hewlett plays the Californian Douglas Hunsiker.
  • Likewise, John and Dodge Landon are played by Angus-born Brian Cox and Surrey-born Tom Felton with Californian accents.
• Viral Marketing: http://www.simianflu.com/ (now defunct) was an in-universe website to promote the sequel.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Tobey Maguire was originally intended for the lead human role, but when it fell through, they settled for James Franco instead. It's not the first time Harry Osborn has been second best to Peter Parker.
  • They also had earlier drafts with a sympathetic vet character (named Stewart, after the unlucky female astronaut in the first film) working at the lab who becomes involved with Will, but this was later replaced by the zoo vet character.
  • An early draft had an older male geneticist as the lead, whose wife had Alzheimer's.
  • Jacobs' death scene originally had Caesar pushing the helicopter off the bridge instead of Koba. This was changed because it felt out of character for Caesar to willingly commit murder.
  • Will was intended to die in the first cut of the film, but the negative reaction of test audiences convinced the studio to make him survive to the end of the film. However, the sequel reveals that he died between films due to the Simian Flu outbreak.
  • Perhaps most glaring, the script originally started as a stand-alone monster movie about the dangers of keeping a genetically engineered chimp as a pet. Only after finishing the first draft, the writers realized that the story could be modified into a prequel for Planet of the Apes and offered it to Fox, who were glad to accept after the failed reboot attempt by Tim Burton.
  • In the scene where Caesar bites Hunsiker's finger and gets sent to the primate sanctuary, he originally amputated the finger and spit it out of his mouth.

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