Fox Signs Andy Serkis For More ‘Planet of the Apes’, Campaigns For His Oscar

The only movie this year that was able to prove my instinct extremely wrong was ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’, which looked very hokey from its trailers but ended up being one of the best movies of the year and a bonafide commercial hit as well. While it was expected that Fox would soon announce a sequel, they were only waiting to sign their biggest player onto the franchise for multiple films first.

Deadline  reports that though director Rupert Wyatt is contractually obligated to return for a sequel, Fox has quickly gone ahead and secured Andy Serkis for “multiple future installments of the series.” For those unaware, Serkis is the guy who provided motion capture for Caesar in the film which is absolutely the best part of the film by far. He’s also done (and is doing for Hobbit) the motion capture for ‘Gollum’ and ‘King Kong’ before, so securing the biggest asset to this rekindled franchise makes most sense for the studio. There is no talk whether James Franco or Freida Pinto will return, but they aren’t needed to.

Also, the studio is set to begin an Oscar campaign for Serkis’ performance in the film. The Academy has never identified motion capture acting as ‘real acting’ up to this point, but I think the emotionally charged performance of Caesar should definitely make a dent in that thinking. The aim here is to get the Academy to realize that most of the emotions we see on screen was actually Andy’s work instead of just the animators, but it’s a tough road since there are many live-action candidates up for this year.

What do you think? Does motion capture performance deserve Oscar qualification?