Today in I Knew This Sh-t Was Never Happening news, Paramount has officially put the kibosh onWorld War Z2, the would-be sequel to Brad Pitt’s disastrousWorld War Zadaptation. Originally slated to bedirected by JA Bayonaand released in 2017, the projectended up passingto David Fincher, where it has languished for the last couple years. Fincher was apparently gearing up to go into production this summer, but when push came to shove, Paramount chose not to greenlight, and so pre-production has shut down. It’s not clear if the project is totally dead, or just dead at Paramount, but at the very least, whatever David Fincher was going to do with it is over.
Honestly, Brad Pitt should just take the L and move on. I know that’s probably not in his repertoire, butWorld War Zhas not been successful for him, by any metric. The only realm in which it made money is on paper—you can tell this isn’t a money maker because Paramount dragged their feet over the sequel and then outright cancelled it, that’s not how you treat successful franchises—and the best you can say about the movie’s legacy, six years later, is that people seem to mostly have forgotten it. Be thankful for small mercies and get out before trying to “fix it” makes the problem even worse.
IfWorld War Zis dead in the water, and Brad Pitt does let it go, then it is clear the only path forward is on television. Short of going back to John Michael Straczynski’s script, which managed to adapt the oral history-style narrative of the book into a linear story, then the only thing to do is make a fake documentary in the style of the book and do it in eight to ten episodes. That way, we can get the survivors in Canada, T. Sean Collins, the Tatenokai, the celebrity house, the Battle of Yonkers—all the good stuff the movie f-cked up.World War Zcomes practically in script form, I do not understand why it has now been ten-plus years of struggle to get a good adaptation out of it. Well, factor in an A-list star’s ego and it starts to make some sense.
Attached - Brad Pitt at the Chris Cornell tribute event in January.
