20th Century Fox must be pretty impressed with what they’ve seen of Matt Reeves’ work on this coming summer’s Dawn Of The Planet of The Apes, as Deadline reports the director is already attached to helm a third Apes movie.

It makes sense, as Fox wanted to make the second film as quickly as they could, but when Rupert Wyatt, who helmed the first movie, dropped out of directing a seuqle saying he didn’t have time to do the movie justice, it resulted in a delay that has ended up with Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes coming out a year later than the studio originally wanted. By signing Reeves now, the studio will be hoping to prevent another gap between movies.

The director will work on the script with Mark Bomback, who co-wrote Dawn of the Planet of the Apes screenplay with Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver and Scott Z. Burns. Reeves’ is firmly attached to direct, but is still negotiating over his scripting duties.

However the movie does depend on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes becoming a success. The film is set 15 years after 2011’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and follows a group of survivors of the simian plague that decimated mankind. They engage in conflict with Caesar (Andy Serkis) and his growing army of apes, although the super-intelligent chimp finds it increasingly difficult to control increasingly violent factions. Jason Clarke, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell and Judy Greer star.