With the next "Planet of the Apes" movie pushed back to 2017, these monkey movies will help you fill the hours while you wait.

We are living in the franchise-heavy film era, which can sometimes feel exhausting (see: ‘Transformers’) or can sometimes be very enjoyable, depending on the product. In television, having a clear endpoint in mind is a good thing (see: ‘Breaking Bad’); meanwhile, studios are now planning their franchises out years in advance. Again, this can be good (Marvel), or, as our own Matt Singer bemoaned, it leads to what he finds to be an unnecessary splitting of the final chapter to extend the life of a franchise.

Fresh off his success with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which has already earned more than $370 million worldwide, filmmaker Matt Reeves has signed a three-year production deal with 20th Century Fox.The director has already signed on to direct the sequel Planet of the Apes 3, which he is co-writing with Mark Bomback.

In-depth discussion of the simian blockbusterFirst there was Rise and now there is Dawn. In the future, there will be war - though it's not clear if the title of the film that tells that story will actually be War Of The Planet Of The Apes. We have our fingers crossed, anyway.Speaking to the director of the sequel, Matt Reeves, the Empire Podcast team got the inside scoop on the making of the film, the cut scenes and the ideas that mattered to Reeves and his team. We then spend a good hour talking through the ins-and-outs of it all, from the CGI to that glorious final shot.

Concept Art by Kelton Cram A growing nation of genetically evolved apes led by Caesar is threatened by a band of human survivors of the devastating virus unleashed a decade earlier. They reach a fragile peace, but it proves short-lived, as both sides are brought to the brink of a war that will determine who will emerge as Earth’s dominant species. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is being directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield, Let Me In), from a screenplay written by Mark Bomback, Scott Z. Burns, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver.