Wes Ball (born October 28, 1980) is an American film director, producer, and visual effects artist. He directed the Maze Runner trilogy (2014–2018), based on the series of novels by James Dashner, as well as Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024), the fourth film in the Planet of the Apes reboot series.
Contents
Education
Ball attended Crescent City High School and graduated in 1999. He graduated from the Florida State University College of Motion Picture Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2002. In 2003, he won a Student Academy Award for his short, animated film A Work in Progress.
Career
Ball got his start as a Hollywood filmmaker with an animated short titled Ruin, which executives at 20th Century Fox saw and offered him the job to direct the adaptation to The Maze Runner. The Maze Runner would be Ball's first feature film. Made on a budget of $34 million, the film pulled in $348 million in box office receipts. Not long after the success of the film, Ball signed a first look deal with 20th Century Fox under his OddBall Entertainment banner.
Ball is attached to direct a film adaptation of Fall of Gods, a crowdfunded illustrated novel from Denmark-based Mood Studios.
In 2017, Ball was hired to direct a live-action/VFX-hybrid adaptation of Mouse Guard, at 20th Century Fox with a script by Gary Whitta and T. S. Nowlin, while Matt Reeves, Ross Richie and Stephen Christy served as producers. Production was expected to begin in May 2019, but following the Walt Disney Company's acquisition of Fox earlier that year, the project was pulled from production two weeks before filming began.
