A new Planet of the Apes prequel titled Rise of the Apes is shaping up to be one of 2011′s big marquee Hollywood titles and maybe just maybe one of its biggest turkeys – but we will, of course, reserve judgement until those damned-to-hell apes return to the big screen to pilfer Earth’s bananas and enslave the human race.

Rising star James Franco, who toked more joints than Cheech Marin at a Bob Marley concert in The Pineapple Express (2008) and practised his best smouldering grimaces in the Spider-Man movies, has signed on to star as a scientist working on a cure for Alzheimer’s. His test subject is an ape called Caesar, who starts to evolve rather rapidly. We assume that, well, one thing leads to another and before you know it the Statue of Liberty is buried in the sand and Charlton Heston is blabbering insults to no-one in particular.

Rise of the Apes will be set in present day San Francisco and will be an origins style story that explains how those pesky apes eventually took over mankind. Unsurprisingly, the actors won’t appear in costumes but will be digitally rendered by WETA using some of the strategies employed in Avatar.

Will Ape-raham Lincoln make a cameo, as he did in Tim Burton’s disastrous 2001 remake? Only time will tell.