The Top 2 James Franco Prequels Co-Starring Primates (Of All Time)

By Brooke Tarnoff | Mar 7, 2013 | 5:00 P
 

There's something familiar about "Oz the Great and Powerful," and we don't mean the witches, wizards and yellow brick roads you'd expect from a prequel of "The Wizard of Oz." It's something even more magical than ambulant scarecrows and crystal balls:

James Franco is sharing another big screen with Simia troglodytes (that's "chimps," if scientific classification isn't your thing). And no, we're not talking about "Pineapple Express." Seth Rogen is a man, people.

If that weren't amazing enough — and it really is — "Oz" isn't even Franco's first prequel featuring the furriest relatives in our taxonomic family.

In celebration of our favorite onscreen pairings — James Franco and his monkey friends — we offer you the Top 2 James Franco Prequels Co-Starring Primates (of All Time).

2. 'Oz the Great and Powerful' (2013)

If we were ranking these purely on the basis of quantity, "Oz" would be the clear victor: it's lousy with monkey types.

Franco plays the titular Oz, the Kansan hustler-turned-wizard who will one day give the Tin Man his heart (many years from now, in 1939). Oz rescues an adorable winged monkey from certain death and earns his lifelong loyalty; the "Oz" of Sam Raimi's imagining also features the Wicked Witch's airborne army, though in his world, the conscripts are horrifying, fang-mawed baboons.

Do we prefer Franco palling around with a CGI cutie or battling a nightmarish horde of flying beasts? Hard to say. They both prove the actor's at his finest when he's chewing scenery with an animal.

Which brings us, at long last, to the number one James Franco prequel co-starring primates...

1. 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes' (2011)

If you have moral uncertainties regarding animal testing, you might enjoy this origin story of the "Planet of the Apes" franchise. Franco plays a scientist and loving surrogate father to Caesar, the unnaturally intelligent chimpanzee who suffers a series of injuries and abuses before launching a large-scale ape liberation.

Loving Caesar is a conflict of interest, certainly — his reaction to the injustices of the human world sets off a chain of events that will end with a sunken Statue of Liberty and a horror-struck Charlton Heston pounding his fists in the sand. But we do.

And though we know humanity won't be saved — we haven't earned it, anyway — ape-loving Franco deserves to live.

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