I haven’t seen the go-for-broke, insane zombie movie.
“The idea of a large-scale, epic, $150 million zombie movie starring Brad Pitt sounds pretty good to me,” Lindelof told THR in a recent cover story. Lindelof went on to add 60 more pages to the script, and Paramount invested an additional $20 million to its $170 million budget, THR reported in May. Star Trek Into Darkness and Lost writer Damon Lindelof was hired for significant rewrites to the film’s third act. Last June, multiple sources described to THR that the film was a “headless enterprise with multiple conflicts.” 21 release date - when it initially was set to open against Disney’s The Lone Ranger, which also was delayed until this summer.Īfter news of the planned extensive reshoots broke, World War Z increasingly was described as a troubled production. World War Z was delayed for six months from its Dec. Like, I had this feeling seeing Moneyball. “You see some first cuts and you go, ‘Oh, it’s everything you want it to be and more.’ It’s working on certain levels that you didn’t even understand when you were shooting it. “It was just atrocious,” Pitt recently explained of World War Z‘s first cut to USA Today. The film was first shown to Paramount executives in February 2012, Vanity Fair reported. In Glasgow, in August 2011, Pitt made headlines for saving an extra who was nearly trampled during a scene where a mass of people were filmed running away from a horde of zombies.Ī few months later, in Budapest, an anti-terrorism squad raided a warehouse to confiscate 85 of the production’s weapons because local authorities claimed they were in working order. The film shot at various European locations, including London and Glasgow (where the production shot scenes that were set in Philadelphia). “This whole thing started because I just wanted to do a film that my boys could see before they turned 18 - one that they would like, anyways,” Pitt recalled at a Las Vegas ComicCon appearance in April this year, the Associated Press reported. The actor planned to develop the project, in part, for his kids. Paramount and Skydance Production co-financed the film with Pitt’s Plan B entertainment producing. Pitt explained his vision to The Hollywood Reporter in January 2012: “Can we take this genre movie and use it as a Trojan horse for sociopolitical problems, and what would the effect on the world be if everything we knew was upside-down and pulled out from under us?” The actor also said that he was inspired by 1974’s The Towering Inferno in adapting the zombie book. Pitt’s World War Z mostly focuses on one man, Gerry Lane, a retired U.N. “In that sense, I found you have an incredible opportunity to make a blockbuster movie that has some sort of substance.”īrooks best-selling novel was subtitled “An Oral History of the Zombie War” and was episodic in nature. “There is no better metaphor than the walking dead as, sort of, the unconscious,” Forster explained. The book was optioned by Paramount in 2006, with Quantum of Solace director Marc Forster conceiving the film as way to bring substance to a blockbuster, the director recalled to Vanity Fair. STORY: Paramount, Brad Pitt Set Sights on ‘World War Z’ Sequel World War Z‘s budget escalated to $190 million from an initial $150 million, extensive reshoots were ordered and a first cut of the film was so uneven that Pitt recently deemed it “atrocious.”
The biggest opening weekend of the actor’s career has helped bring positive headlines for the project, which faced a series of setbacks during a reportedly arduous production process. It also opened to $45.8 million overseas in its first 25 markets for a total $111.8 million. World War Z took the first step towards profitability this weekend as Brad Pitt‘s tentpole adaptation of Max Brooks‘ novel of the same name grossed a strong $66 million at the domestic box office.