Warner Brothers has such high hopes for The Legend Of Tarzan that they’re releasing it at the height of the summer blockbuster season. They’re betting that it will run for several weeks, amass a hefty box office return, and will also kick start a brand-new lucrative franchise.

The stunning first trailer for The Legend Of Tarzan suggests that the blockbuster will be a moody, thrilling, and action-packed surprise hit of the summer with a modern examination of the titular character and his doting wife Jane.

Rather than starting at the origins of Tarzan in the jungle and working forward in a linear fashion, writers Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer and director David Yates have decided to begin The Legend Of Tarzan with Alexander Skarsgård’s titular character as John Clayton III, Lord Greystoke. It has been years since Lord Greystoke lived in the jungles of Africa and has since become gentrified from a casual life alongside his wife Jane Porter (Margot Robbie) in England. And after being invited back to the Congo to serve as a trade emissary for the British Parliament, Lord Greystoke is thrust back into the life he left behind and begins to turn back into Tarzan. He's a pawn in a deadly convergence of greed and revenge that has been orchestrated by Christoph Waltz’s Captain Leon Rom, a sneaky Belgian.

Warner Bros. hired the two writers to write separate drafts for the film which were then merged together under the direction of acclaimed director, David Yates. Yates' main selling point was his amazing work directing the final four Harry Potter films as well as the prequel, Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them.

Alexander Skarsgård the 39-year-old True Blood and Generation Kill actor beat out numerous other heavyweights for the role of Tarzan. 

The Swede set out on a rigorous four-month training regiment to get his body in tip-top shape and he certainly looks the part. Describing his role, Skarsgård has said: 

Australian beauty Margot Robbie has made a meteoric rise to becoming a bona-fide Hollywood leading lady. As Tarzan’s wife Jane Porter in The Legend of Tarzan, Margot Robbie is playing a character that is iconic in pop culture history.  Director David Yatehas promised that Margot Robbie's Jane Porter is far from a "passive partner to Tarzan"::

    She's a really strong, assertive, beautifully knowledgable, very sexy modern woman who can more than look after herself. 

She merges her old-school glamour and beauty with a modern toughness and complexity that was previously missing from Jane. Margot Robbie is perfectly suited to both the character and The Legend Of Tarzan.

The Legend Of Tarzan possesses an impressive supporting cast. Not only is there the Academy Award nominated actors Djimon Hounsou and John Hurt, but there is also Academy Award winner Jim Broadbent.

But it is probably the supporting presence of Samuel L. Jackson that will undoubtedly impress viewers the most. In The Legend Of Tarzan Samuel L. Jackson plays George Washington Williams, the pioneering American Civil War veteran, politician, minister, lawyer and journalist who repeatedly broke ground in African-American history. 

George Washington Williams visited Congo shortly before his death, where he helped to spur an outcry over the treatment of people in the country. This is the first time that George Washington Williams has ever actually appeared on screen. 

The Legend Of Tarzan has yet another Academy Award winning actor wirh two-time winner Christoph Waltz in the villainous role, playing another character based on a real-person, Leon Rom. 

Rom sounds like a downright despicable individual, as not only has it been speculated that he was the main inspiration for Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness (Apocalypse Now), but he allegedly used to keep severed heads of Africans in his flower bed, and even murdered individuals for the smallest of offenses. 

Having portrayed the SS-leader Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds and Blofeld in Spectre, Christoph Waltz is quite adept at portraying wicked individuals. But this might just be his most detestable yet.

The biggest battle, however, is the weekend that The Legend Of Tarzan comes up against Steven Spielberg’s take on Roald Dahl’s celebrated children's story, The BFG. 

Spielberg's special effects driven, big-budgeted action adventure for all the family, based on an established novel from one of the most beloved writers of recent memory, will be a formidable foe for the Ape-Man.. The Legend Of Tarzan’s only chance of eclipsing it will be if it’s met with impressive critical response. 

However, since then the appearances of Tarzan on the big-screen has only been sporadic. 1981’s Tarzan, the Ape Man and 1984’s Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan, Lord Of The Apes and Disney’s 1999 animated adventure Tarzan all fared well. This could help Warner Bros. in their cinematic cause. Because of the established legacy and identity of Tarzan mixed with the lack of a recent incarnation, audiences should be ready to see a worthwhile Tarzan film.  The first trailer for The Legend Of Tarzan suggests that, for the first time in decades, there will be such a film.

It's true that some apes, like gibbons and orangutans, practice brachiation, that hand-over-hand swinging that gives playground "monkey bars" their simian name. But the African great apes that raised Tarzan don't get around by swinging from branches, and they certainly don't swing from vines, mostly because that would be impossible. About a quarter of plants in tropical forests are thick, woody vines called lianas, but, like other plants, lianas are rooted at the bottom into the soil. As a moment's thought will reveal, that makes them incredibly hard to swing from.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan's creator, may have known this. In his books, Tarzan's vine habit is never mentioned. Instead, the ape-man is a treetop leaper who "could spring twenty feet at the dizzying heights of the forest top" or even "drop twenty feet at a stretch from limb to limb in rapid descent to the ground." Tarzan didn't become a swinger until 1928, when actor Joe Bonomo, who was set to play Tarzan in the silent film serial Tarzan the Mighty, broke his pelvis, and was replaced by a stuntman named Frank Merrill. Merrill wasn't just a bodybuilder who once finished just behind Charles Atlas in an "America's Most Perfectly Developed Man" contest. He was also a two-time national gymnastics champ, and the film leveraged his upper body strength and high-bar abilities to display a new trick: swinging from treetop ropes disguised as vines. When Johnny Weissmuller took over the role in 1932, the vine trick continued—but now performed by a stunt double, circus aerialist Alfred Codona. Weissmuller, after all, was a swimmer, not a gymnast.

"According to Wikepedia (sic), the colony of rhesus macaques was established around Silver Springs in Florida around 1938. The monkeys were released by a tour boat operator to enhance his Jungle Cruise ride. 

"Wikepedia (sic) says a traditional story that the monkeys were released for scenery enhancement in the Tarzan movies that were filmed at that location is false, as the only Tarzan movie filmed in the area, 1939's "Tarzan Finds a Son" contains no rhesus macaques. . ."