Planet of the Apes Movies Ranked: All 10 Films (2026)

Still the one, fifty-eight years on, and the reason is not the twist everybody can quote. Rod Serling and Michael Wilson took Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel and turned it into an argument the film never stops having: Charlton Heston's Taylor arrives contemptuous of humanity, spends two hours being told by apes that his species is a savage animal, and is proved right in the last ninety seconds in the worst possible way. John Chambers' prosthetics won an honorary Academy Award and are the reason the ape society reads as a society rather than a costume party, because the actors can still act through them. Jerry Goldsmith's score is percussive, atonal and completely unlike anything a 1968 studio picture was supposed to sound like. It cost $5.8 million and made $32.6 million, and every sequel here is downstream of it, including the ones made forty years later.

The best film the franchise has made since 1968 and the one that proved the reboot was not a fluke. Matt Reeves takes over and does the hardest possible thing with a blockbuster: he gives roughly half the running time to characters who mostly do not speak English, shoots long stretches in sign language with subtitles, and asks a summer audience to follow an argument between two apes about whether peace with humans is survivable. Toby Kebbell's Koba is the franchise's best villain because the film has already shown you the laboratory scars that made him, so his position is not evil, it is evidence. Andy Serkis gets the other half of it as a Caesar who is trying to be a statesman and is not sure he can be. It grossed $710.6 million, the highest of any film here, and it is the only entry that would work as a stage play.

The most ambitious of the ten and the closest this series has come to art-house filmmaking on a $150 million budget. Reeves borrows openly from *Apocalypse Now* and *The Great Escape* and turns the third act into a prison-camp picture, with Woody Harrelson's Colonel as a Kurtz who has thought his own atrocity through and can explain it calmly. Serkis is extraordinary in it and the industry's inability to work out what to do with a performance-capture lead is the reason he was not nominated for anything. It is placed below *Dawn* for one reason: the film it wants to be is bleaker and slower than the story it has left to tell, and the final movement resolves on a note the previous film had already earned. $490.7 million, and the only entry here whose emotional climax is a title card.

The reboot nobody wanted, arriving ten years after Burton had apparently killed the property, and it works because it is small. James Franco's Alzheimer's researcher, a house in San Francisco, one ape raised as a son, and then a shelter, a fire hose and the single most famous word in the franchise since 1968. Andy Serkis and WETA had already done Gollum and King Kong; this is where performance capture stopped being a novelty and started being casting, because Caesar carries a film in which no other character is remotely as interesting. It cost $93 million and made $481.8 million. TMDB actually rates it a hair above *Dawn* and this list disagrees: *Rise* is a very good origin story, *Dawn* is a film about how societies decide to go to war.

Wes Ball restarts the clock several generations after Caesar, and the smartest thing in it is that Caesar has become scripture: the apes who quote him have never met him and a warlord is busy rewriting what he said. Owen Teague's Noa is a genuinely likeable lead, Kevin Durand's Proximus Caesar is having more fun than anyone else in the franchise, and the eagle sequences are the prettiest images in the series. What keeps it out of A is that it is a first act. At 145 minutes it is the longest film here and it spends most of them getting a young ape to the place where the story he is actually in can start, with Freya Allan's Mae carrying a reveal the film declines to resolve. $397.4 million, and a middle chapter is owed to it.

The strangest film in the franchise and the best of the original sequels, because it inverts the premise instead of repeating it. Cornelius and Zira take Taylor's ship back through the same time warp and land in 1970s Los Angeles, where two talking chimpanzees become a media sensation, get fitted for suits, and are interviewed on chat shows. For an hour it is a comedy and it is genuinely funny. Then the government works out what their existence implies about the future and the film turns into one of the bleakest things Fox released that decade. Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter are the reason it lands: they had played these two under the makeup for two films already and they play the third one as a marriage. Made for $2.5 million, and it is where the series' time loop actually closes.

The angriest film here and the one most obviously made in 1972. Caesar, the child of Cornelius and Zira, grows up in a North America that has replaced its dead pets with enslaved apes, and the film is an uprising picture shot on a corporate plaza in Century City with $1.7 million and a lot of nerve. Roddy McDowall is playing a different character from the one he played three times before and the switch works. It is held back by the budget in ways the earlier sequels are not, the future city is visibly a shopping centre, and by the studio, which forced a softer ending onto the theatrical cut after previews went badly; the unrated cut restores the version the film had been arguing for the whole time. Rent that one if you can find it. As released, it is a great forty minutes attached to a compromised twenty.

The sequel that had to exist and could not work out why. Heston agreed to return only briefly and only on the condition that his character be killed off, so James Franciscus plays a second astronaut doing a compressed version of the first film's discoveries while the plot waits for Heston to come back. The mutants are the interesting half: a telepathic underground cult in the ruins of New York worshipping an unexploded doomsday bomb, which is a genuinely nasty idea and is shot like a fever dream. The problem is the ending, which does not develop the first film so much as delete it, destroying the entire planet in the final shot so that nothing can follow. Three films followed anyway. $19.0 million on a $3 million budget, and it is the reason the series had to invent time travel.

The most expensive film here at $100 million and the most frustrating, because half of it is superb. Rick Baker's makeup is better than the 1968 work by any technical measure, Tim Roth's Thade is a real performance of real menace, and the ape city and the cavalry charge are exactly what a 2001 blockbuster remake should look like. Everything human is inert. Mark Wahlberg is asked to play a man with no interior life and does, the film has no argument about anything, and the closing scene, a Lincoln Memorial with Thade's face on it, is a twist assembled backwards from the reputation of a better ending. It made $362.2 million and got no sequel, which tells you how the audience felt on the way out. Ranked here on what the money bought, not on the craft, which is genuinely good.

The end of the original run and the only film here that feels like it was finished because a contract said so. It cost $1.7 million, roughly a fifth of the first film in real terms, and every frame shows it: a handful of sets, a mutant army with no scale, and a climactic battle in which the stakes are explained rather than staged. The idea underneath it is not bad, Caesar trying to build a society that does not repeat the one he overthrew, and John Huston turns up as the Lawgiver to frame the whole saga as a story told to children centuries later, which is a lovely idea in a film that cannot afford it. It grossed $8.8 million, the lowest of the ten. Worth watching once, to see a series that started with the Statue of Liberty end with a statue crying, and then stop.