Some movies just don’t seemingly want to get made, and it’s hard to not see World War Z 2 as a primary examples. Five years in the making, the long-gestating sequel to the original World War Z in 2013 has been through a handful of creative overseers, including multiple potential directors. David Fincher has now been attached to the Brad Pitt-produced project for a while, but today comes news of another delay, as filming has been pushed back again so Pitt will be able to star in Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. That pushes World War Z 2 filming back to the fall of 2018.
Pretty much everything related to this series has been complicated from the start. The original World War Z was based on Max Brooks’ 2006 book of the same name, but rather than keep the book’s interview-based format, which told retrospective stories of the zombie war from all over the globe, the film adaptation was instead rewritten to focus entirely on Brad Pitt’s character Gerry Lane searching for a cure. Those changes were very poorly received by fans of the book, but the film still went on to make a whopping $540 million in worldwide grosses. The apparent synopsis of the sequel, meanwhile, makes it sound as if the events of the first are somehow being ignored. Says Bloody Disgusting:
“Pitt will once again star as former U.N. investigator Gerry Lane, who heads on a worldwide search to find the source of the infection and a way to halt its spread.”
If you’ve already discovered a drug that makes living humans invisible to the zombie swarm, why is it important to find the source of the infection, anyway? Isn’t humanity now “halting its spread” by going on the offensive against an enemy that can no longer detect our presence? Even David Fincher himself was less than confident in an interview with Collider, sounding like he hasn’t seen a version of the script yet that is worth making into a movie:
“I’ve been working for about a year now with Dennis Kelly on World War Z,” Fincher said. “We’re hoping to get a piece of material that’s a reason to make a movie not an excuse to make a movie.”
Pitt is a producer on the World War Z sequel, which means it will probably happen eventually, if he still wants it to happen. It’s probably a little bit discouraging for Paramount to see the producer and star of the World War Z sequel push the movie back once again so he can pal around with Tarantino at Sony, but whatcha gonna do? At this point, if they ever actually get this movie out of Pitt and Fincher, they’ll be happy.