World War Z may be looking for a new director

First there were delays then there was the news that J Michael Straczynski's script was being rewritten by script hot shot Matthew Michael Carnahan.

Now a rumour that came from the San Diego Comic Con that Paramount Pictures is currently looking for a new director.

Currently attached is Marc Forster who directed Quantum of Solace. To me Quantum was a huge disappointment after the excellent Casino Royale. The action scenes in Quantum just didn't work. Therefore, the news that Forster may not be doing World War Z is actually pretty cool to me. I just really want to see Max Brooks excellent book on the big screen - The Battle of Yonkers, lobos, the astronauts on the space station watching the swarms of the undead, underwater zombies and more.

This is a rumour at the moment, but who would be a good director for this adaption? Zack Snyder, Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi, Lloyd Kaufman? Who could it be?

HOME

World War Z gets a new scriptwriter

On FANGORIA RADIO last week, guest Max Brooks told them about a new writer taking on the film version of his best-selling undead-epic novel World War Z. The movie is being developed by Paramount and Brad Pitt’s Plan B Production, and J. Michael Straczynski had already written the script.

Now taking on the adaptation reins is Matthew Michael Carnahan, a specialist in political thrillers such as State of Play and The Kingdom.

“He’s one of Hollywood’s hot A-list writers, so if they went after him and paid him a mountain of gold, it definitely shows their confidence in this project,” Brooks said on the show. “They say it’s a positive move because they’re very excited, but the truth is, it’s also positive because they just paid him a buttload of money, and [with] the money they paid him, the money they paid Straczynski and they money they’ve paid me, they’ve really dug themselves a deep hole, so they better make this thing!”

Not sure whether this news is good or bad. Carnahan may have just been brought in to polish the political aspect of the script or maybe he's rewriting huge chunks of it.

Marc Forster is directing it and it was supposed to start filming this year. Obviously that is not the case, so who knows what problems there are with the script.

I just want to see this film! (below is a fan made teaser trailer using a whole host of other films).

HOME

World War Z has hit some delays

Some bad news for fans of cool zombie literature (that includes me). Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace) says that the anticipated film adaptation of World War Z may have to wait a little longer.

Speaking with Migros Magazin, Forster says the film's script still needs a lot of development and is "still far from realization". As a result he's likely moving forward with another project entitled Disconnect which is 'ready to go'.

Disconnect is said to be about how humans deal with new technologies and the changes it causes to interpersonal relationships.

World War Z, based on the novel by Max Brooks, is a series of interviews conducted with various people about the events that transpired when a zombie pandemic swept the globe.

I am a bit surprised about Forster's comments as a script written by J Michael Straczynski has been around for ages (check out the script review). In December last year Straczynski also said "I’m working with [Marc Forster] notes to make one final pass on the script, Our hope is to get it moving into production by the first of the year."

It looks as if they haven't got final draft sorted. I have an awful feeling that there are some disagreements on the way the film should go and that the film may not be as cool as the book. Fingers crossed they get it resolved soon.

Discuss in the forum or leave a comment below.

HOME

World War Z - Possible concept art

io9 had these amazing pieces of art by Daniel LuVisi. They show the Battle of Yonkers from Max Brook's World War Z and they are absolutely amazing. I hope the film looks as good as this.

The artist said "This is the image I did, to get on the film World War Z with Marc Forster, director of Quantum of Solace. Can't say whats going on or what the outcome is right now, but it's not in the negative zone :)

This was one of the most difficult images I've ever done. Incredibly challenging to the point where I wanted to quit. But through thick and thin I forced myself to complete it."

Discuss in the Forum

Zombie swarm or Presidential Inauguration

Some amazing satellite images from GeoEye show just how many people attended Barack Obama's inauguration yesterday.

Is it just me though or would that be what a zombie apocalypse would look like from space? If you've read World War Z you'll know the chapter I'm getting at.

Great photos and cheers to Del for pointing them out.

Home / Forum / Guestbook

World War Z update from J. Michael Straczynski

MTV spoke to J. Michael Straczynski about his World War Z adaption of tha Max Brooks book. It's about to begin production with Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace) at the helm. Here's what Straczynski had to say:

“We talk about it as a thriller, the closest comparison being ‘The Bourne Identity, Most zombie movies to this point have been small, focusing on a few people in a house. And this has got real scare. You’re in India with hundreds of boats trying to get out of there with a tidal wave of zombies. The scale of what we’re doing here is phenomenal.”

“Now that Marc is here, I’m working with his notes to make one final pass on the script, Our hope is to get it moving into production by the first of the year.”

“The fictional concept of the book is that its written by someone with the UN, so let’s tell that story. Let’s show the book being written. We follow this guy all over the world as he goes on these interviews, and he has his own personal story as well. You’re cutting between the past and the present, how he got to this point. It has that international feel to it, and because it goes backward and forward in time, we can cherry-pick our favorite moments in the book. Some of it is crazy in scale.

It’s huge. It’s as political as the book was. And it ends with that book being completed.”

Home / Forum / Guestbook

World War Z to be directed by Marc Forster

Paramount has hired Quantum of Solace director Marc Forster to helm World War Z, the big screen adaptation of Max Brooks bestselling novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. The 352 page book chronicles the aftermath of a great zombie-human war.

J Michael Straczynski penned the screenplay. The basic premise of the book is that it is an oral history of the zombie war, compiled by an unnamed government employee. The movie follows this researcher, named Gerry Lane (possibly to be played by Brad Pitt, who is producing the project), as he travels the world conducting interviews with survivors, 10-years later. Forster told Variety that the story reminded him of “the paranoid conspiracy films of the ’70s like ‘All the President’s Men.”

The official plot description from the book below:

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, “By excluding the human factor, aren’t we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn’t the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as ‘the living dead’?”

HOME / FORUM.

Max Brooks talks about Warren Ellis, Prison and Zombie Survival Guide Recorded Attacks Graphic novel.

HOME / FORUM.

World War Z Script Review

Quiet Earth have got hold of J Michael Straczynski's script for the excellent Max Brooks book, World War Z (highly recommended reading material). If done right this will be amazing, blind samurai gardener killing zombies with a hoe, astronauts in the International Space Station watching the vast hordes of the undead roam across the globe, the battle of Yonkers, the lobo, the zombies on the sea floor...so many excellent bits in there. Brad Pitt's production company have it so hopefully they'll get the budget they need to make it right.

Here is a snippet of the review:

Hundreds, then thousands of zombies crest the hill, swarming down onto the stranded refugees. What was chaos before turns to blind, mass panic. Armed men fire, but the undead tide keeps coming.

People dive into the sea, swamp sideboats, struggle and fight to get into the water.

A big boat cabled to a smaller one that has been beached to allow passengers begins pulling as more and more people jump onto the boat. It swerves, tilts, and BREAKS, spilling people into the sea.

--- as the zombies plunge in as well, others tear apart those on the shore. the sea foams with people swimming toward the boats, which are themselves trying to escape, only to be caught in the maze of other boats crowding the port.

Helf is torn by what he sees, the horror, the desperate screams of men and women thrown overboard amid the waves and the death prowling below, snatching up at them and pulling them down.

The script itself is a very engrossing read and is extremely easy to visualize due to the amazing talent of writer J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, Ninja Assassin). When you go to script writing school, one of the first things they tell you is to leave out all the extraneous description of camera work, style, or lighting, because that's up to the director or the cinematographer to decide and not you. Straczynski though, is smart enough to know that his screenplay needs to be represent how the complete film could look so its full of all kinds of descriptions of styles (handheld camera, news footage, elapsed time sequences, etc) that allow you to visualize pretty much exactly how it's gonna look.

HOME / FORUM.

World War Z is coming.

World War Z is a great book by Max Brooks (son of Mel). It deals with a bloke travelling around the World to interview survivors of the zombie uprising. They include soldiers, politicians, families, astronauts and blind samurai. It's an excellent book and has been optioned by Brad Pitt's production company, Plan B Entertainment. J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5, Rising Stars, Spider-Man, The Twelve) has been busy adapting it and I've just read this quote on an interview he did with Comic Book Resources.

The adaptation of "World War Z" is in and done. Everyone is very happy with it, and now they are figuring out the best marketing campaign for it, since it is a political/thriller/zombie movie, which is not something you tend to see a lot of. That is for Brad Pitt’s company.

I can't wait for this movie. I just want to see the scene described by the astronaut stuck on the International Space Station as he watched the huge zombie herds move across America, or see the submarine move through the masses of zombies walking across the ocean floor. So many good sequences in the book that will look amazing on the big screen...as long as it is done right. I have high hopes.