Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire director Chris Columbus took over the helm of the new Planet of the Apes movie for 20th Century Fox in early 1995. He hired scriptwriter Sam Hamm (Tim Burton's Batman, an unproduced treatment for a Watchmen movie, and Columbus' co-writer on an unproduced Fantastic Four script). Hamm's Planet of the Apes screenplay kept the 'aging-virus' plot from Terry Hayes' previous script but was heavily influenced by Pierre Boulle's original source novel, perhaps even more so than was the 1968 movie adaptation.