It won’t hit theaters until December 2012, but World War Z, a movie based on the novel of the same name by Max Books, will be coming to the Silver Screen:
It’s coming. World War Z. The long-awaited adaptation of the zombie cult classic is shooting, and will be in theaters late next year. Paramount announced a December 21, 2012 holiday release for World War Z, director Marc Forster’s adaptation of Max Brooks’ novel about a global zombie takeover. This stars Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale and Bryan Cranston; Pitt is also producing with Plan B partner Dede Gardner, financed by Skydance Productions. This puts the zombie epic up against Disney’s The Lone Ranger and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi that very weekend, plus Tarantino’s Django Unchained on Christmas Day.
I’m a fan of this book and The Zombie Survival Guide. Paramount is putting some money behind it, reportedly $125 million, which is a lot for a zombie movie. The 2004 re-make of Dawn of the Dead was done for less than $30 million; but then again, the most well-known actor in that movie was Ving Rhames. World War Z will require a lot of CGI if they hope to do it right. But they are deviating from the book, which consists of interviews with those who experienced or fought in the “zombie war,” and will focus on the lead character (Gerry Lane, played by Brad Pitt, who, according to the synopsis of the film, “traverses the world in a race against time to stop the Zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments and threatening to decimate humanity itself.”
This is a book that would have been difficult to turn into a film, and probably wouldn’t have been that interesting to most film-goers, just given how it was written. Still, I’m looking forward to it.
