You’d think that Wes Ball traveled a charmed road when, three weeks after showing his animated short film Ruin, he made a Fox deal to develop that feature and was also set to direct Maze Runner, which turned into a blockbuster trilogy. You would be wrong.
Ball, who helmed the fourth iteration of the Planet of the Apes film series that 20th opens next week, also won a Student Academy Award for his animated short A Work In Progress. But it took 10 years wandering the wilderness before he decided to make Ruin because it meant so much to him. Even after his Maze Runner successes, Ball got a big deal to direct Mouse Guard at Fox, only to see the live action/VFX hybrid get unplugged two weeks before production right after Disney inhaled the other studio and scrapped the $175 million film he’d worked so hard to prepare. Here, Ball takes us through the ups and downs that leave him on the precipice of two major franchises. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is geared to fuel a trilogy, and there is also The Legend of Zelda, the Sony Pictures screen adaptation of the huge Nintendo video game franchise.
