Paramount has announced that World War Z 2 is officially going ahead. It’s only taken 13 years to get here… With Skydance having spent billions on buying Paramount, the merged company is focused on dusting off its biggest franchises to make back a few dollars. Paramount Skydance, to give its proper new name, has already ... World War Z 2 | Paramount officially announces sequel to its 2013 hit
Paramount has announced that World War Z 2 is officially going ahead. It’s only taken 13 years to get here…
With Skydance having spent billions on buying Paramount, the merged company is focused on dusting off its biggest franchises to make back a few dollars.
Paramount Skydance, to give its proper new name, has already announced that Top Gun 3 is now in official development after four years of vagueness.
It’s also said that World War Z 2 is finally going to happen – 13 years after the original.
At this stage, there’s little more to the story than the announcement itself, which emerged from Paramount’s panel at CinemaCon (via Fangoria). It marks a renewed effort to get a sequel to the 2013 zombie hit going, though, after multiple false starts. The Orphanage director JA Bayona was attached to direct a follow-up at one stage; then David Fincher replaced him. Then it all went rather quiet.
World War Z was quite an odd film when you stepped back and looked at it. It was nominally based on Max Brooks’ source novel, but took little more than the premise – that of a global zombie outbreak. Where the book was an epistolary, taking in the unfolding disaster from multiple perspectives, the film, directed by Marc Forster, turned it into a star vehicle for Brad Pitt.
Read more: World War Z 2 | The zombie sequel that never was
Pitt starred as the improbably-named Gerry Lane, who travels the globe looking for a means of preventing civilisation from descending into cannibalistic mayhem. Production on the film was, bluntly, an utter nightmare, with whole chunks of the film scrapped and a new, smaller-scale ending added. Written by written by Damon Lindelof, it involved a fizzy drinks machine located in Wales.
Despite all this, World War Z was a hit, perhaps helped by its PG-13 rating. There was talk at the time of a trilogy. If that’s still the case, then we can expect the third film to emerge at some point in the 2040s.
We’ll bring you more on World War Z as we get it.
