The original was a big hit in 2013, yet despite years in development, World War Z 2 never emerged. A look back at why the zombie thriller refused to happen:
Founded in 2001, Plan B is the highly successful production company co-owned by Brad Pitt, which won Oscars for 12 Years A Slave and Moonlight, and scored sizeable box office hits too. Over its history, Plan B has signed first-look production deals with such studios as MGM, Warner Bros and Amazon MGM. However, by far the longest relationship that it enjoyed was with Paramount, who had first dibs on Plan B’s projects between 2005 and 2013. And one of those just happened to be its biggest hit: World War Z. It’s probably no coincidence that the expensive zombie disaster thriller was release in 2013 – the very year Paramount’s deal ended.
It’s easy to overlook, almost exactly 12 years on from its release, just what a troubled production that film was. It was based on the novel of the same name by Max Brooks, the latest in a procession of ‘unfilmable’ books that Hollywood had a crack at. The reason this one was considered so troublesome was that instead of it offering one continuing narrative, it tells the story of a zombie war through lots of first-person different accounts rather than one.
The novel Robopocalypse follows a similar structure, and was for a long time a Steven Spielberg project. But that ultimately came to zero, and it’s hard to not think the struggle to wrestle it into a movie screenplay was one reason why. Yet with World War Z, a way through was found, with Babylon 5 creator J Michael Straczynski arguing for a Bourne style approach. That seemed to offer some progress.
Rewrites followed, but that core idea still held, and in 2010, Quantum Of Solace helmer Marc Forster was recruited to direct. Pitt would star, Paramount was to put up the near-$200m asking price (although it hadn’t gone that high at the time), and as we charted in a podcast episode here, it was full steam ahead:
The problem came in the middle of 2012, a year after filming had begun. At considerable expense, the entire final act of the film was rewritten and reshot in post-production, causing a release date delay and unending internet articles suggesting – not unreasonably – that the film was in deep trouble.
Yet incredibly, it was all turned around. While the promotional campaign was light on the fact that zombies were involved (and that’s some understatement), and while the film went for a PG-13 rating (much to the understandable consternation of fans of the book), it defied expectation and grossed over $540m worldwide. Not only was it a huge hit, a sequel was surely inevitable.
In fact, the original plan, announced before the release of the first film, was that a trilogy was to be pursued. Confirmation of World War Z 2 followed within weeks of World War Z hitting big. Yet the problems were soon to mount.
Firstly, there was a question of who to direct.
Reports had suggested that Pitt and Marc Forster hadn’t been a perfect match, not helped by the significantly overhauling of the first film in post-production. There seemed little chance that Forster would return, but few could grumble when Juan Antonio Bayona was announced as the new choice instead. Off the back of The Orphanage and The Impossible, he seemed an excellent choice. Heading into early 2014, then, it seemed like things were moving forward.
But there was still a script to get right, and all parties wanted to avoid the last minute course-correction suffered by the first movie. Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight was hired in May 2014 and submitted his draft. A year later, Paramount was confident enough to announce a June 2017 release date, although Pitt and Plan B were also now working on projects for the likes of Netflix at the same time.
While those projects were moving forward – War Machine, for instance – World War Z 2 wasn’t. And it suffered a huge blow when Bayona left at the start of 2016, to make Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (which seemed more certain to hit its schedule) having also directed the superb A Monster Calls.
His departure was mitigated by the reputation of his replacement: David Fincher. Having worked with Pitt on several movies, a reunion was mooted, and Fincher duly entered talks for the film. He had a commitment to the Netflix show Mindhunter, and so things weren’t going to move quickly. They didn’t, but over a year after his involvement was first suggested, Fincher was edging closer to the dotted line. In early 2017, it even looked like he might sign it, with Paramount confirming that the release date had shifted, and 2019 was more likely.
Spoiler: the film didn’t come out in 2019. As the cinematic plates were shifting, so a World War Z sequel was looking riskier and riskier. Not least given a gap of at least five years since the first movie.
Crucially too, this wasn’t a big comic book movie, and there was growing uncertainty as to how the international market for the film would hold up. $200m of the first film’s take had come from the States, and with the budget for the sequel likely to be another $200m or so, Paramount needed as broad a market for it as it could get.
And it wasn’t going to get one. The plot of the first film had been altered to try to ensure – unsuccessfully – that the movie got a full release in China. But with the clock ticking, it needed one this time around, and when it became clear that it wasn’t going to get one – in 2019, it was revealed that China’s pretty much blanket ban on zombie films was holding – the plug was finally pulled, even with Fincher circling. Since then, the market for North American movies in China has dwindled significantly, and zombie-themed entertainment is now dominated by hit TV series The Last Of Us and Danny Boyle’s revival of his 2002 film, 28 Days Later – the first a planned trilogy of films, 28 Years Later, is out this month.
In fact, Fincher has since said that his planned World War Z sequel would have borne some resemblance to The Last Of Us, adapted from the hit videogames by showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann.
“It was a little like The Last Of Us,” Fincher told GQ in 2023. “I’m glad that we didn’t do what we were doing, because The Last Of Us has a lot more real estate to explore the same stuff. In our title sequence, we were going to use the little parasite… they used it in their title sequence, and in that wonderful opening with the Dick Cavett, David Frost-style talk show.”
World War Z, then, will never happen, and there’s not even been talk – at least yet – of resurrecting it as a TV series, where it may find a more natural home considering its source material structure. Plan B, meanwhile, has moved its attentions elsewhere, and Paramount is pursuing different options. Pitt and Fincher are set to collaborate again, but not on anything zombie-related: their expected to start filming a Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood spin-off for Netflix later this year. Written by Quentin Tarantino, it’ll continue the story of Cliff Booth, the stuntman introduced in that earlier movie.
The one World War Z film we got is an imperfect beast, with some of its edges cut off. But it had some striking imagery, it had promise – and it became yet another Hollywood blockbuster that built to an ultimately non-existent sequel…
An earlier version of this feature was originally published in 2020. It has since been revived and updated.
