(The Killing's excellent Mireille Enos does what she can as Pitt's wife here, but it's mostly a thankless role involving waiting around for her hubby to call. Sure, his wife and kids are safe with the fleet… as long as Gerry can stay alive long enough to accomplish his mission. (There are some carefully applied cuts on Pitt's pretty-boy face, though, for those who are interested.) That said, the film's still got plenty of scares.Įventually, Gerry and his family make it to the safety of a military fleet at sea, but his old bosses want him back on the job stat. Move along, Fangoria fans, nothing to see here. Amid all this carnage, there is nary a trace of real guts or gore.
But the scale of this scene makes the familiar feel fresh, even while we quickly realize that this film will not be offering up much blood. And soon enough, the city streets around them are transformed into a disaster zone in a matter of minutes as the bitten bite the living, creating more bitten… You know the drill.
Stuck in traffic, Gerry notices something is amiss. Forster (Quantum of Solace) wastes no time getting the end of the world started here, as Pitt and his brood - after some fleeting moments of family-bonding time - are overwhelmed early in the film by a deluge of the living dead.
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Nah, Pitt's character, Gerry Lane, jets around the world - well, what's left of it - in search of an answer to how to stop the plague before it's too late! You could say this is the epic of zombie films… and it works for the most part. This isn't Rick and Shane camping in the woods.
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And this is where that line about the president comes in: The film, which Pitt also produced, is designed to be less a horror movie than it is a globe-spanning, international thriller, albeit one with zombies in it. But World War Z, inspired by if not really based on the popular book by Max Brooks, isn't just a zombie movie. Hell, my mother-in-law watches The Walking Dead! So of course Brad Pitt is starring in a zombie picture. But like many of the geek elite's fixations from years past, zombies are now big business. Movie stars didn't headline them, studios didn't bankroll them with franchise tentpole dreams, and the mainstream public hardly even knew about them. Not bad for the crew behind a movie that, at certain points as it staggered to its ending, seemed like it would be dead on arrival.See, the living dead genre was for decades an on-the-cheap, hide-in-the-farmhouse kind of thing.
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in Hollywood, Straczynski penning cult hit TV series Sense8, Forster directing Christopher Robin for Disney, and Damon Lindelof crafting one of 2019's top TV shows, Watchmen. Meanwhile, everyone involved emerged unscathed, with Pitt going on to arguably peak with 2019's Once Upon a Time. Still, despite its troubles, World War Z's success showed that audiences were hungry for more walking dead. Also apparently factoring in was China's ban on zombie movies, which crippled the potential for international revenue.
Unfortunately, this success didn't cure the contagion that plagued the property, as the sequel was scrapped after several stop-and-go efforts that included the signing of director David Fincher. It also clocked Pitt's biggest opening weekend, devouring $66.4 million in its first three days. Yes, they would: World War Z exploded to a box office take of $202.4 million domestically and $540 million worldwide, which were pretty great numbers for a film with such a troubled production history. With that kind of momentum behind the project and director Marc Forster - a veteran of the James Bond franchise and critically acclaimed dramas like Monster's Ball - on board, the stage seemed set for World War Z to be a new kind of zombie movie: Serious-minded, and perhaps even award-worthy. Straczynski's script also ended up on the 2007 Black List, an annually compiled survey of the film industry's favorite as-yet-unproduced screenplays. Comparing it in scope to the Academy Award-nominated apocalyptic thriller Children of Men, McWeeny offered up the description of a script that kept the book's interview-based structure, painting a picture of a post-war world in which people are "starting to wonder if survival is a victory of any kind." A leaked version of the script made its way into the hands of the film nerds at Ain't It Cool News, where it was called Oscar-worthy by that site's Drew "Moriarty" McWeeny. Straczynski was a much-loved name in genre fan circles, and his work on World War Z touched a nerve with exactly that audience.
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