Planet of the Apes Timeline: Every Film in Story Order

The original run begins with planet of the apes 1968, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, and its story starts when a crew of astronauts crash lands in a lake on an unknown planet. Their instruments suggest about two thousand years have passed on Earth, so the date at the start is measured in elapsed time rather than a calendar year.

George Taylor (Charlton Heston), Landon and Dodge cross a desert and find mute humans being hunted by armed gorillas. Taylor is shot in the throat and taken to Ape City, where the chimpanzee scientists Zira (Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) study him. The orangutan leader Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) sees him as a threat. Taylor and a mute woman named Nova flee into the Forbidden Zone, where Zaius shows him evidence of an older human civilization. On the shoreline, Taylor finds the half buried Statue of Liberty and realizes the planet is a ruined Earth.

The second film picks up directly after the first, and in beneath the planet of the apes (1970), directed by Ted Post, Taylor has vanished inside the Forbidden Zone. A second ship crashes and its only survivor, Brent (James Franciscus), finds Nova wearing Taylor's dog tags and rides with her toward Ape City.

There, General Ursus rallies the apes to invade the Forbidden Zone over the objections of Dr. Zaius. Brent is treated by Zira and Cornelius (now played by David Watson, since McDowall was unavailable), and after he and Nova are captured, Zira helps them escape into a cave that turns out to be a ruined subway station. Below the city he meets telepathic mutant humans who worship an old atomic bomb, and he finds Taylor held captive. The apes invade, Nova is killed, and a dying Taylor sets off the bomb, destroying the planet.

The third film moves the story to 1973, and escape from the planet of the apes (1971), directed by Don Taylor, begins as Cornelius, Zira and Dr. Milo repair Taylor's spaceship and flee just before the planet is destroyed. A time warp carries them to Los Angeles, and they are taken to the zoo, where Stephanie Branton and Lewis Dixon begin to study them.

The apes become celebrities until the President's science advisor, Dr. Hasslein, learns that Zira is pregnant and fears what their descendants could mean for humanity. A commission orders her pregnancy ended, and the couple flee to a circus run by Armando, where Zira gives birth to a son and names him Milo. Hasslein tracks them to a shipyard, where Zira and the baby are shot, Cornelius kills Hasslein and a sniper kills Cornelius. Zira had secretly swapped babies, so the real Milo survives with Armando and begins to speak.

The fourth film jumps to 1991, and conquest of the planet of the apes (1972), directed by J. Lee Thompson, opens in a world where a plague has killed every dog and cat and people have taken apes as pets and then as slave labor. The talking ape Caesar (McDowall), the son of Cornelius and Zira, has been hidden since childhood by Armando.

When Armando dies in police custody, Caesar is sold at auction and ends up in the household of Governor Breck, where Breck's aide MacDonald slowly suspects what he is. Caesar studies how apes are beaten and trained, organizes them, and is captured and tortured by the security chief Kolp. He escapes and leads a violent uprising through the city. With Breck at his mercy, Lisa and MacDonald urge restraint, and Caesar declares that the apes have seen the birth of the planet of the apes. The studio reworked an earlier, bloodier ending after a poor preview.

The original run ends with battle for the planet of the apes (1973), directed by J. Lee Thompson, which sits last in story order and looks furthest ahead of any entry in the five film run. Caesar now presides over a shared village of apes and surviving humans, and his curiosity about his parents sends him to the ruined Forbidden City in search of archived recordings.

What he finds there is a colony of mutant humans, scarred by radiation and governed by Kolp. While Caesar is away, the gorilla general Aldo grows hostile toward the human residents, stages a coup and sees Caesar's son Cornelius killed. The mutants then attack, and apes and humans defend the village side by side. Aldo kills a fellow ape, the one act the apes' law forbids above all, and Caesar faces him down. With Aldo dead and the attackers repelled, Caesar settles on equal shares of the land for both species, with the apes still armed. A last scene set 600 years on shows the Lawgiver recounting these events to a mixed circle of human and ape children.

The second run is a single film, and planet of the apes 2001, directed by Tim Burton, does not connect to the 1968 saga or to the modern series. Air force pilot Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) works on a space station where apes are trained for missions. He follows a lost test chimpanzee into an electromagnetic storm and crashes on a planet where apes rule and humans are hunted and enslaved.

Leo meets the sympathetic chimpanzee Ari (Helena Bonham Carter) and the brutal General Thade (Tim Roth), then escapes with a group of humans toward the forbidden temple of Calima. Calima turns out to be his own crashed station, the Oberon, and time has carried him far into the future. The fighting stops when the pod carrying the chimpanzee Pericles arrives. Leo flies back through the storm and crash lands in Washington, D.C., where the Lincoln Memorial now honors Thade and apes rule Earth.

The third run starts at the beginning of its own story, and rise of the planet of the apes (2011), directed by Rupert Wyatt, is set in San Francisco. Will Rodman (James Franco), a chemist at Gen-Sys, tests the drug ALZ-112 on chimpanzees to find a cure for his father's Alzheimer's. A test chimp named Bright Eyes rampages and is killed, and Will secretly takes her baby home and raises him as Caesar (Andy Serkis).

Caesar learns sign language, is later sent to an ape shelter where the caretakers are cruel, and befriends the orangutan Maurice. A stronger gas, ALZ-113, kills Charles and infects Will's colleague Robert Franklin. Caesar steals canisters of the gas, raises the other apes' intelligence, and leads a breakout that ends in a fight on the Golden Gate Bridge. The apes escape into the redwood forest, and a scene during the credits shows a map of a virus spreading around the world.

The modern run then moves forward a decade, and dawn of the planet of the apes (2014), directed by Matt Reeves, begins ten years after the Simian Flu pandemic. Only a small fraction of humanity remains, and Caesar's colony lives in the forest outside San Francisco.

Malcolm (Jason Clarke) leads a small group that wants to repair a dam to restore power to the city. Caesar allows it, but his lieutenant Koba (Toby Kebbell), who was tortured in a human lab, distrusts every human. Trust grows when Ellie treats Caesar's sick mate, yet Koba finds an armory in the city and urges a first strike. Caesar refuses, and Koba shoots Caesar during a gathering, blames the humans and takes over. Caesar recovers, frees the loyal apes and rejoins his son, Blue Eyes. At the top of a tower he lets Koba fall, then prepares the apes for war.

The third modern film is set two years after the war began, and war for the planet of the apes (2017), also directed by Matt Reeves, follows Caesar as the human military unit Alpha-Omega hunts his hidden colony. The unit's leader, the Colonel (Woody Harrelson), leads a raid that takes a terrible personal toll on Caesar's family.

Caesar sends the tribe across the desert in search of a refuge and rides out with Maurice, Rocket and Luca to find the Colonel. They take in a mute orphan girl, whom Maurice names Nova, and meet the lonely chimp Bad Ape. The Colonel is using captured apes as forced labor, and Caesar learns that a mutated virus is stripping humans of speech. The apes break out, another human army attacks the compound, and an avalanche buries it. The Colonel ends his own life. Caesar, wounded by a crossbow bolt, reaches the new refuge and dies there, and Maurice promises that Caesar's son Cornelius will learn what his father did.

The timeline's latest entry leaps far ahead, and kingdom of the planet of the apes (2024), directed by Wes Ball, takes place many generations after Caesar's death. Apes rule the world and most humans have become wild and mute. Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee from a clan that bonds with eagles, returns home to find that raiders led by the gorilla Sylva have burned his village and taken his clan.

Noa is joined by the orangutan Raka, who teaches him Caesar's original ideas, and by a human scavenger called Mae (Freya Allan) who can speak. They are taken to the coastal kingdom of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), who has enslaved clans to open a sealed human vault. The vault is flooded, the captives escape, and Proximus falls from a cliff into the sea. Mae travels to a human satellite base and reconnects humans with other survivors, which hints at renewed conflict.

What comes next is covered on the kingdom of the planet of the apes sequel page. 20th Century Studios has an untitled new film in development with Matt Shakman directing, and TheWrap reports it is a new original story rather than a sequel.

The short answer is that the three runs do not form one timeline, and in my opinion the franchise is easier to follow once you accept that. The original five films are connected by cause and effect: the bomb in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) destroys the world, and Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) sends Cornelius, Zira and Dr. Milo back to 1973 in the repaired ship. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) then gives us Caesar's revolt in 1991, and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) ends with the Lawgiver 600 years on. It could be argued that this run folds back on itself, since the apes' world ends in Beneath and is born again in Conquest, but the films never state how the loop closes, so I would not pretend they do.

The 2001 film is the simplest to place: Leo Davidson's story is self contained, and its Washington, D.C. ending does not lead anywhere else. The modern series is, in my opinion, the tightest piece of plotting of the three. Rise ends with a map of a spreading virus, Dawn opens ten years after the Simian Flu, War takes place two years after the war began, and Kingdom skips many generations.

Two questions come up often. Is Noa a descendant of Caesar? Kingdom places him generations after Caesar's death and has Raka teach him Caesar's ideas, but the plot never states that he is Caesar's descendant, so that remains a guess. Why is Caesar's son called Blue Eyes? Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) does not explain the name. The nearest connection on screen is that Caesar's mother was Bright Eyes in Rise, which suggests a family habit of eye names, though that is my observation and not a stated explanation.

For viewing, I would watch the original five in release order, then the modern four in release order, and place the 2001 film wherever suits you. You will not lose any plot either way, and the planet of the apes original vs reboot page compares the two main continuities in more detail.