Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes may not have revealed the fate of James Franco's Will Rodman in dialogue, but it subtly confirmed the worst. Planet Of The Apes was a landmark sci-fi film from 1968, where Charlton Heston lands on a planet dominated by sentient apes who have enslaved mankind. The film was also one of the earliest to spawn a long-running movie series, being followed by four sequels that ended with 1973's Battle For The Planet Of The Apes. It also received a short-lived television series in 1974.
Tim Burton would remake Planet Of The Apes in 2001 with Mark Wahlberg, but while this blockbuster was a success it's received weak reviews and failed to spawn a sequel. The next reboot was 2011's much better received Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, where a scientist named Will (James Franco) raises an intelligent chimpanzee named Caesar (Andy Serkis). Rise was the first entry in a trilogy following Caeser, which ended with 2017's dark War For The Planet Of The Apes, which dealt with the impending regression of humanity and apes becoming the planet's dominant species.
While Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes may have been sold as a James Franco movie in 2011, it was Andy Serkis' Caeser who received all the praise. The story ended with Will saying goodbye to Caeser following the ape uprising and being shocked to realize he can speak. In the original script, Will was supposed to die in this sequence as Brian Cox's character - who owned the primate shelter Caesar and the others escaped from - tried to shoot Caeser, only to hit Rodman instead. The movie now ends with Will's neighbor - a pilot unknowingly infected with the Simian Flu - causing the outbreak of the virus worldwide.
Will doesn't feature in Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes outside of a brief scene where Caesar watches a video of himself playing with the scientist when he was young. This scene finds Caeser hiding out in Will's house after Koba tries to kill him, and while it's assumed Will and his girlfriend Caroline (Freida Pinto, Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle) were killed during the outbreak of the virus, this is never confirmed in dialogue. However, there's a major giveaway Will died in the house; there's a FEMA sign marked outside the front door confirming infected people are inside. The only people to survive the outbreak of the virus are naturally immune to it, so if Will or Caroline became infected, that means they died in the early stages of the outbreak.
Further evidence of this is the fact Will's old station wagon from Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes is seen deserted in the front of the house, meaning he likely never left his home. Producer Dylan Clark later suggested Will was never supposed to survive past Rise's ending, which was his punishment of sorts for unleashing the Simian Flu. Will's demise was seemingly kept just vague enough in Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes that it's possible the filmmakers could have brought him back for War, which ultimately didn't happen.