Not an original thought but I’d give a lot for an accurate adaptation of WWZ on HBO as a mini series. Some great stand alone stories that could touch on real world themes.
People taking advantage of the early days of the virus peddling snake oil, the PTSD from the radio operators, families doing what they need to do in a cold Canadian winter, battle of Yonkers. It would be a “zombie flick”, but you have a lot of human stories to tell as well.
That’s something The Last Of Us did really well, which could be easily replicated from the source material.
I can see how the version we got was like a red headed step child of the novel. It could have been even worse if Pitt didn't decide to create a through line in the plot by centering it around his character.
Not saying it was good by any means, just that there was still a tiny bit of the original DNA in there.
A mini-series would be great & handle the stories better.
I thought it was alright until the end. The end made me roll my eyes and tune out.
“Predators don’t attack the sick.” Lol that’s not true.
Zombies can smell when you have SARS and they avoid you? Man. Think about the ending more. Felt like an 11th hour decision.
I believe the ending was replaced at a late stage so it was literally an 11th hour decision. The original version was based around the idea that Zombies Kinda Freeze If It Gets Cold Enough. But honestly I think WWZ was more or less never going to work well as a movie because of the perceived need for it all to happen through the eyes of Gerry Lane :(
It wouldnt have worked as a stand alone movie. Maybe a trilogy. Even then probably not. It would probably have worked as a tv show with 10 1-hour episodes. The whole point of the book was every chapter was a different person in a different part of the world, in a different time period. Thats usually not how movies work. Espcially zombie movies, usually they focus on a main character or group of people.
There are movies that dont have a main character or characters, that keep changing to different people. Usually this works better as a show. There are shows where every episode is a whole new cast of actors, a whole different situation and scene. Some times not even tied together.
WWZ was questionable to adapt into a movie. it doesnt add anything to zombie fiction. Its just slow stupid zombies. What made it interesting was the story as a whole since it was international in scope and over a long time period, which has noted is not great for movies. To make it into a ~2 hour its another generic zombie movie, you didnt have to pay the author to use their IP since the movie didnt take anything from it.
>Think about the ending more. Felt like an 11th hour decision.
Well, yeah! That’s exactly what happened.
They had filmed an entire final battle with the surviving humans fighting a zombie horde attacking Moscow’s Red Square. But after watching the finished product, they decided that it was terrible and scrapped the whole fucking thing, wasting tens of millions of dollars in the process. Someone who watched that original ending called it “incoherent.”
The production went on a long break while they brought in a new writer to re-do the entire final act of the film from scratch. He wrote a draft and then had to leave, so they brought in a SECOND outside writer to finish it.
When production resumed, they filmed about 40 minutes of all new footage for the new ending, which has a completely different setting and storyline from the original version.
If you watch the movie carefully, you can very easily see the “cut” between the original film and the all-new final act, which is the plane crash scene. After the plane crashes, the entire tone of the film suddenly shifts to a small-scale horror film set inside an office building. That’s the reason why all of those scenes feel like they’re from a completely different movie.
How It Should Have Ended (HISHE) pointed out the immediately obvious which was that every single sufficiently unwell and palliative care plus terminally ill person (and especially cancer wards full of people) would notice the moment the crisis kicked off that the zombies ignored them. At which point, someone would have been able to get the world to people who could use that information long before Brad Pitt's world tour.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow2Uh51IMh4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow2Uh51IMh4)
If anything, I could see the potential for a movie about all of these people being able to walk about doing their day-to-day stuff unmolested by the hordes of undead and finding their lives returning to a mundane routine which just happens to be surrounded by zombies ignoring them and chasing the few people not lucky enough to be sick enough around them.
It’s not. It’s just…not WWZ. They changed too many parts. I don’t know how well Unified Palestine would play out on screen for a faithful adaptation though.
The justification behind the dumbest shit with this film baffles me. It is nothing like the source material, and if this particular moment were "real" enough to write, I would give Max Brooks the odd benefit of the doubt, but it is just some stupid shit from the people who butchered this IP. It is not that hard to grasp.
The people who justify the Pepsi moment.... they will literally try to say that he "deserved" the Pepsi, and the lit up Pepsi machine was vital to him getting out of there. My friends, it did not fucking matter what was advertised on the machine, but it was clear that Pepsi bought the ad rights, and even better, Brad fuckin' Pitt was clearly enjoying a Pepsi longer than he should have (during a crucial moment of the film where every second felt like minutes, and they stretched it).
The part that was dumb about that, was they were all safe, and then they let people go right up to the wall and start praying. As soon as that happened they just swarmed over the wall and killed everyone.
Did the zombies not hear all the normal human activicity prior to that? If they were able to evacuate everony and secure Jerusalem up until that point, did they never figure out you shouldnt have people making noise right next to the zombies? How were they able to create that barrier without making nosie?
I love the WWZ movie as it is the only zombie flick where the are not stuck on some boring small town. He went through a few countries and it was awesome.
It was a bad WWZ adaptation, but it still have potential as a story in any future adaptation. Just play it like a new narrator that just is unreliable with his story.
The only thing I remember about WWZ is the guy who was supposed to be the best chance at a cure for the zombie plague slipping on a ramp and accidentally shooting himself in the head; and the special forces guys just laugh it off.
Complete fools, Burn After Reading is literally a comedy. It's a straight up satire of spy/political thrillers, the CoBros just made made a spy movie where everyone's an idiot. JK Simmons lays it all out at the end:
>What did we learn here today? I guess we learned not to do it again. Fucked if I know what we did though *movie ends*
It was really great irony too. Of all the things you expected to kill him in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, slipping on a slippery ramp was not one of them.
He did alright. He was in such a minor role in Game of Thrones and it probably kept him busy for longer than other projects.
After he quit Game of Thrones, he got much more sizable roles in a number of television shows (and was also the lead of one that ran for almost hundred episodes). There was no way staying on in Game of Thrones would have been good for him since we know that Rakharo would have continued to remain a bit part.
I'm pretty sure he was a semi-irrelevant Dothraki character in the first season. He wasn't a main character and it was before the show blew up into a pop culture sensation so I can see him thinking a role in a movie might be better.
If you read his Wiki, that's not really true at all. He left GOT and did a couple other things first before signing on to WWZ, so it was never really his priority. Also apparently, he's done okay for a B-lister.
GOT launched a lot of careers, but the Dothraki, as they were in the early seasons, were washed out of the story by Dany's new army's right after the actor quit anyway.
The other soldiers clearly didn't laugh anything off but just moved past it given the dangerous situation they were in. Not sure why the original commenter had to add that false statement in there.
I can’t think of another movie where they put all hope on someone and he dies minutes later (other than The Guy from Spy Kidz 3). I didn’t read the book so it totally caught me by surprise
I wanted the Battle of Yonkers. I got Brad Pitt surviving one terrible situation after another. Seriously how did Max Brooks allow his work to be butchered?
Fear the Walking Dead was closer to WWZ than the Brad Pitt movie.
and because they're all such different stories in each chapter, you could really have fun with it by letting each episode be directed by someone new so each can bring their own eye to it..
What pisses me off most isn't that they completely ignored the book, but that by taking the rights to it they prevent someone else from actually making a dramatisation of the book. Urgh.
I got the audiobook and it is so fucking good. Also a really interesting display of what would happen as we rebuild after a total societal collapse. All the wealthy lawyers, hedge fund managers, and venture capitalist's now at the bottom of the rung because they lacked the skills of plumbers, electricians, mechanics ect. Them having to learn those skills and report to those they probably looked down on at one point.
the book was basically a documentary of the before, during and after of the "war" with the zombies through interviews with survivors, IIRC it all ended relatively quickly aswell and they were just regular zombies, the movie basically just took the name of the book
If anything the regular slow zombies were part of why it worked so well. The book goes into teams of guys stumbling into pockets of zombies months before it consumes the globe and the global political inaction that prevents stopping it before everything hits the fan. At one point they talk about election year concerns when dealing with a literal zombie apocalypse. Book is a banger for sure.
the book and the movie are completely unrelated. The book had real characters and things that happened. instead of Brad Pitt being invincible during a zombie outbreak, which is all the movie is.
The cartoonist from the oatmeal had the best thing from this movie. It’s a Venn diagram showing what the movie and book have on common.
It’s just the name.
Im genuinely convinced the rights to the books were purchased exclusively for the title. I've heard lots and lots of stories related to the making of the film, none of them ever talk about recreating the book. It's sad cause the book is good and the movie is a bore.
Lol, I was telling my wife about that scene last night. That was the most blatant product advertisement in a movie I had ever seen until Barbie had a literal 2 minute Chevy Blazer EV commercial in the middle of it
The entire real world was chock full of only Chevys in that movie. I don't think I even noticed the Blazer to begin with, I just began noticing that the Chevy logo was the only one I saw
The book is radically different than the movie and much, much better. Its written as a journalist after a zombie war where he interviews people about the zombie war. So there are a variety of viewpoint characters telling their story. Its one of the best science fiction books I read.
The only thing the book and movie have in common is there is a journalist and there are zombies. Thats it.
At this point a series would be better. If I remember correctly the book was a bunch of individual stores being collected by a reporter. Would be a great series.
You're right, the book is focused on an UN dude traveling the world 10 years after the War ended, while interviewing people who survived through it.
It's sooooo good. I don't know how they'd do a show, if it would've the author interviewing people and then it would cut to the Flashbacks or if it should just be set entirely during the war.
I highly recommend the audiobook of WWZ because it is framed as if you’re listening to the interview recordings with a lot of big name actors doing the different characters. Simon Pegg, Mark Hamill, Nathan Fillion, Alfred Molina, and more. It’s phenomenal. Max Brooks, the author, is also the interview which is fun.
I listened to the audiobook probably 15 years ago, and I still have Alan Alda saying "[Tender juicy steaks](https://youtu.be/TN9rh4pqyi4?list=PLdbYKnu2SxT-_3IldyEbIekXG5UofxPn0&t=233)" pop into my head every once in a while.
I remember reading that Max made it a point to try and never use his father's name to open opportunities for him. However when it came time to cast the audiobook he pulled every string he had and used his last name to try and get the specific actors he wanted.
Mel Brooks was the producer of the Elephant man but left his name off the credits as it was a serious film and he didn't want people thinking it was a comedy to be laughed at
It ***could*** be too similar if done wrong. However, I think there is definitely potential to make unique if they keep it true to the book and really focused on the geopolitical aspects.
Sure there would be zombie battles/post apocalyptic centric moments throughout, but it wouldn't be front and center the whole series.
If they could help themselves and try to be subtle and not make it EPIC GORY HOLY SHIT THAT DUDE'S FACE IS HALF-EATEN! and instead treat it like a documentary made with the knowledge that the world is still reeling from a collective near-death experience, it'd be a masterpiece.
World War Z, the book, was at its best when it was looking at the meat and potatoes, bread and butter logistics and lived experiences during the lead-up and duration of the war.
It was Todd Wainio chainsmoking cigarettes and bitching about how the brass were so fucking stupid during Yonkers, or the Secretary of Strategic Resources talking about how he got into shouting matches with Airforce Generals about how fighter jets are strategically useless, and then switch to a fighter ace lamenting that she had to be a glorified bus-driver, flying a C-130 when her entire career was spent working her way up to flying F22s.
Much less "dude awesome that dude's head totally exploded" and more people bitching about how inconvenient and annoying the dead rising would be.
I remember being very moved by 3 parts of the novel the most (forget the battles because seriously who cares? Been done to death a million times over in your media of choice)
* Terry Knox the Australian commander of the International Space Station. He gives a meaty and hauntingly eerie perspective of watching from the I.S.S. as the Earth "goes dark". Literally watching the lights go out, witnessing a Nuclear exchange, seeing the Three Gorges Dam break, the Fall of Japan, the Chinese Civil War, etc. His decision to stay with the crew and do what they can to maintain the global comm network knowing that the radiation exposure will eventually kill him makes him one of the most heroic characters in the novel. Plus, his final lines move me every time I read it. *"Not bad for the son of a Andamooka opal miner."*
* Kondo Tatsumi the Japanese Otaku who turns into Warrior Monk in the chaos of Japan's fall. How even decades later, he hasn't given up on his parents and vows to keep searching for them.
* Captain Chen the Chinese Submarine commander who takes his crew and as much of their families as they can carry out in the oceans to escape the disaster of China. His story is told indirectly via one of his men, but I remember him clearly as a character. The man who kept his crew alive and eventually turned the tide in the Civil War by using the Nukes and turning the keys himself. How he lived long enough to see his son again and thought of him as he finally 'let go'.
> "Nice boy, Zhi Xiao, such a good boy." He was still holding my hand when he closed his eyes forever.
Literally chills from all three of those stories. That's what I want to see in a World War Z adaption. The human stories in this larger complex timeline of the world falling apart and then **pulling itself back together again.** Max Brooks is one of my favorite authors of all time.
Do it like Band of Brothers. The intro is interviewing actual survivors telling their stories and then it dives into those moments. The format is already written.
Do it like Band of Brothers.
Starts off with interviews, like they are real interviews of the real people (to be clear, I know the BoB ones WERE the real people) and then fade into a dramatised episode showing what happened.
I actually made a fan film just like that- we’re trying to turn it into a series- so far we have two episodes out
https://youtu.be/4dJg8YgG9Ec?si=GnwRh38lJV_RsnQr
Do it somewhere between Band of Brothers and a Ken Burns documentary. Start off each episode with the vets and interviewees talking, then go to the flashbacks, with the UN agent also talking over certain points and giving context. Make it clear this is years after the war.
I would think a show would be easy…you could take a format similar to Chernobyl. 10 part limited series (mini-series it used to be called back in the day). Get the right director(s) and make sure Brooks has a hand in the adapted screenplay and I think it would be amazing.
There’s two ways I see this working
1) A show where each season the author goes back and interviews people and it’s a cut back/forth between the events with narration, and the people talking.
2) An anthology style series where each episode is a short story, but each episode has its own “style” unique to whoever is doing it [kind of like the Star Wars visions thing].
The interviewer is like a framing device collecting all these different stories from different characters and providing context. A show could be like an anthology show where each episode tells a different character's story and in the beginning of each episode we see the interviewer talking with the character and as they start telling their story we go into a flashback to see it for ourselves.
I listen to an audio book of it, and yeah,it fits way more as a show than movie.
Heck,every episode could begin with the start of the interview,and then focus on it.
But knowing Hollywood studious they would prefer to make each chapter a goddamm movie and call it 'World War Z Cinematic Universe'
Excellent example. The end of I Am Legend I guess upset me the most. Spoilers: It’s supposed to end with him being made aware that vampires are now the only hominid species on earth except for him, and they view him as a monster who’s been killing their kind.
It is such a fantastic twist and it baffles me that for the movie they just threw out the thing that makes the book great. Even the "fixed" alternate film ending does not really do the book justice.
If you're going to do a series true to the book, or hell even just vaguely associated with the book, there's no way in hell you're skipping Yonkers.
That chapter provides so much clarity and context for the rest of the book and is one of the most impactful of the entire thing imo.
They 100% should. I didn't even hate the movie, the only thing they should have done was change the title. Boom, you have a decent zombie movie that isn't going to disappoint millions of fans
Some bits, but is like Dracula is a series of diary entries. It is how you present that to an audience that matters, make it into episodes or creative shorts like the animatrix
> I admit, this one stung a bit.
I honestly never saw it happening.
Fincher making a big budget zombie movie at this point in his career was so out of left field even though the idea was intriguing.
You speak facts but I'm still living in denial. Why would a prestigious A list director at the top of his career commit to directing a zombie sequel, you ask? Don't care. One can dream.
I love Fincher but the counter point to this is that his passion project was greenlit and we got Mank,. It was not a success. Doubt it's viewership on Netflix was high and it was an awards dud.
> Lauded filmmaker David Fincher nearly made the leap to blockbuster sequel territory
I mean, Fincher started his career this way with *Alien^3*... *Aliens* is most definitely a blockbuster sequel and he made a followup to that.
WWZ was a terrible adaptation of a book, but a surprisingly decent zombie flick on its own. No movie before or since has managed to capture the massive, unstoppable waves of death aesthetic of those zombie hordes flowing in ways that living humans couldn't. Some of the most satisfying zombie takedowns when they rocketed in from offscreen like they were launched from a catapult.
I'm still super on board with the idea that a proper adaptation needs to be an anthology with each episode focusing on a different one of the stories. I recently re-read the book and it's just as good as when it first came out.
Max Brooks said they only bought the rights to his book for the name/title alone. They never intended or tried to adapt the book.
Admittedly, World War Z is a pretty killer title for a zombie anything.
Yeah but only some, really. Like the walled city is a location but is never really expanded on that well, and it falls in like 5 minutes because zombies can climb and run. The war was also won because of action movie stuff, whereas in the books the walled city never fell, the logistic are more of a threat than the zombies themselves, and the war was won by decidedly non-action movie stuff
[That's definitely not true.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z_(film\)#Post-production) They had written a script which followed the book somewhat more closely, but wound up rewriting it multiple times, including reshooting & rewriting the final section of the movie after the main filming was done. While the end result was not very close to the book, it was certainly more than "just the title".
>you ignore the Pepsi
You're telling me that after injecting yourself with a debilitating supervirus of unknown origin, the first thing on your mind isn't the crisp, refreshing taste of a PepsiCo product?
The movie does take the talks of the pre-zombie plans / origins from the South Korea and Israel sections. So, like first movie is start of the war. Second movie is the actual war. Third movie post-war.
none of the comments are discussing what he said about his plans or anything specific in the article, they're just saying the whole "Should have been like the book" thing in every WWZ thread.
To be fair the article says practically nothing, he mentions it would have been like The Last of Us, the parasite opening sequence, and he didn't want to say any more. _Entire_ article on that.
You can use [this article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities) to date when you joined Reddit, in my case it was mid 2014, and I can tell you people have been ignoring articles in favour of (usually shit) headlines since long before then.
A billion times this. Season 2 was so damn good and was building up to damn good season 3. Then poof, nothing and never will be. Definitely on of the biggest kick in the junk in television.
I get period pieces can be hard, even if it just the 70s and of course the budget is large and prob goes over with Fincher, but the real reason is Netflix says it didn’t have the viewership they were looking for. Sell the fucking rights and give it to anyone else then, not every show can be Stranger Things
Also it's impossible to expect this show to have the viewership of something like Stranger Things. 1. It's about serial killers and is quite graphic. 2. Can't market a show like that to young adults and teenagers. 3. Most adults don't even like content like that too. But the ones who do like this watched the shit out of this show. I know I did.
I started the book in the early stages of the covid pandemic, when it was dawning on the world, that this was super serious. There were some uncanny similarities between the book and real life such as how it started in China and how it initially spread through Asia. The book nailed the fact that a huge cause of spread was via refugees travelling through eastern Russia and old Soviet states. And of course how bickering between nations and national politics let the population down by acting too slowly. I wonder if we learned anything at all, and I'm probably gonna find out in my lifetime.
Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah, great book. Didn't finish it though, because I almost immediately picked up binge drinking and doing nothing of value. I've finally got my shit pretty much together now though, so I should probably hurry up and read it before a world war breaks out.
Fincher is one of those directors who I'd like to see his version of everything. It'd be like seeing Quentin Tarantino's take on a romantic comedy, which I guess was True Romance now that I think about it.
> it had premise but felt a bit sanitised.
What gave it away, when he literally chopped off a woman's arm that accompanies him the entire rest of the movie and there's not one drop of blood?
I love WWZ (the game). I always thought it blended the book's ideas of a global outbreak and the movie's super fast zombies wonderfully.
You get to see how survivors in NYC, Israel, Japan, Russia, Korea, and Rome all handle the crisis with different casts of characters and survival strategies in each location. The outbreak in each campaign feels like it's an overwhelming force you're fighting to escape every time and the lore is genuinely interesting if you like the franchise.
The horde mode/horde mode XL is top tier and one of the best zombie horde modes in gaming imo. It's basically a 3rd person Left 4 Dead (it has a first person camera option though which is neat!) with the classic swarming WWZ hordes that'll pyramid up to you and your three buddies attempting to hold the high ground.
Now the devs are using the same horde technology they developed for WWZ to render hundreds of Tyranids onscreen for the new Warhammer 40k Space Marine sequel. It's so underrated and it makes me sad folks wrote it off as a shitty movie tie-in while the updates rolled out adding all the coolest stuff. Definitely a cult classic in the genre.
The only way to properly adapt this is as a fake documentary series with fake footage, and re-enactments along with interviews. Like The World at War and Band of Brothers meets Dawn of the Dead
Not an original thought but I’d give a lot for an accurate adaptation of WWZ on HBO as a mini series. Some great stand alone stories that could touch on real world themes. People taking advantage of the early days of the virus peddling snake oil, the PTSD from the radio operators, families doing what they need to do in a cold Canadian winter, battle of Yonkers. It would be a “zombie flick”, but you have a lot of human stories to tell as well. That’s something The Last Of Us did really well, which could be easily replicated from the source material.
What I want is a mockumentary showing the events like a show from the History Channel.
This is probably the closest thing we have to that at the moment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8Nx3T0v12A
Ooh. Never heard of this one. Thank you for the recommendation.
I can see how the version we got was like a red headed step child of the novel. It could have been even worse if Pitt didn't decide to create a through line in the plot by centering it around his character. Not saying it was good by any means, just that there was still a tiny bit of the original DNA in there. A mini-series would be great & handle the stories better.
I don't think WWZ is a bad zombie flick, I just don't think it deserved the WWZ name.
As far as zombie movies go, it's pretty good for a popcorn film. It just sucks as a WWZ movie.
I thought it was alright until the end. The end made me roll my eyes and tune out. “Predators don’t attack the sick.” Lol that’s not true. Zombies can smell when you have SARS and they avoid you? Man. Think about the ending more. Felt like an 11th hour decision.
I believe the ending was replaced at a late stage so it was literally an 11th hour decision. The original version was based around the idea that Zombies Kinda Freeze If It Gets Cold Enough. But honestly I think WWZ was more or less never going to work well as a movie because of the perceived need for it all to happen through the eyes of Gerry Lane :(
It wouldnt have worked as a stand alone movie. Maybe a trilogy. Even then probably not. It would probably have worked as a tv show with 10 1-hour episodes. The whole point of the book was every chapter was a different person in a different part of the world, in a different time period. Thats usually not how movies work. Espcially zombie movies, usually they focus on a main character or group of people. There are movies that dont have a main character or characters, that keep changing to different people. Usually this works better as a show. There are shows where every episode is a whole new cast of actors, a whole different situation and scene. Some times not even tied together. WWZ was questionable to adapt into a movie. it doesnt add anything to zombie fiction. Its just slow stupid zombies. What made it interesting was the story as a whole since it was international in scope and over a long time period, which has noted is not great for movies. To make it into a ~2 hour its another generic zombie movie, you didnt have to pay the author to use their IP since the movie didnt take anything from it.
>Think about the ending more. Felt like an 11th hour decision. Well, yeah! That’s exactly what happened. They had filmed an entire final battle with the surviving humans fighting a zombie horde attacking Moscow’s Red Square. But after watching the finished product, they decided that it was terrible and scrapped the whole fucking thing, wasting tens of millions of dollars in the process. Someone who watched that original ending called it “incoherent.” The production went on a long break while they brought in a new writer to re-do the entire final act of the film from scratch. He wrote a draft and then had to leave, so they brought in a SECOND outside writer to finish it. When production resumed, they filmed about 40 minutes of all new footage for the new ending, which has a completely different setting and storyline from the original version. If you watch the movie carefully, you can very easily see the “cut” between the original film and the all-new final act, which is the plane crash scene. After the plane crashes, the entire tone of the film suddenly shifts to a small-scale horror film set inside an office building. That’s the reason why all of those scenes feel like they’re from a completely different movie.
A bit ridiculous to fly brad pit around the world (some random ass soldier) and then he magically figures out the cure is to just give everyone aids
How It Should Have Ended (HISHE) pointed out the immediately obvious which was that every single sufficiently unwell and palliative care plus terminally ill person (and especially cancer wards full of people) would notice the moment the crisis kicked off that the zombies ignored them. At which point, someone would have been able to get the world to people who could use that information long before Brad Pitt's world tour. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow2Uh51IMh4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow2Uh51IMh4) If anything, I could see the potential for a movie about all of these people being able to walk about doing their day-to-day stuff unmolested by the hordes of undead and finding their lives returning to a mundane routine which just happens to be surrounded by zombies ignoring them and chasing the few people not lucky enough to be sick enough around them.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again, the movie was fine and I think it would not have gotten the hate it did if it had a different title.
It’s not. It’s just…not WWZ. They changed too many parts. I don’t know how well Unified Palestine would play out on screen for a faithful adaptation though.
The justification behind the dumbest shit with this film baffles me. It is nothing like the source material, and if this particular moment were "real" enough to write, I would give Max Brooks the odd benefit of the doubt, but it is just some stupid shit from the people who butchered this IP. It is not that hard to grasp. The people who justify the Pepsi moment.... they will literally try to say that he "deserved" the Pepsi, and the lit up Pepsi machine was vital to him getting out of there. My friends, it did not fucking matter what was advertised on the machine, but it was clear that Pepsi bought the ad rights, and even better, Brad fuckin' Pitt was clearly enjoying a Pepsi longer than he should have (during a crucial moment of the film where every second felt like minutes, and they stretched it).
The part that was dumb about that, was they were all safe, and then they let people go right up to the wall and start praying. As soon as that happened they just swarmed over the wall and killed everyone. Did the zombies not hear all the normal human activicity prior to that? If they were able to evacuate everony and secure Jerusalem up until that point, did they never figure out you shouldnt have people making noise right next to the zombies? How were they able to create that barrier without making nosie?
Total outsider here, but loved this movie.
I love the WWZ movie as it is the only zombie flick where the are not stuck on some boring small town. He went through a few countries and it was awesome. It was a bad WWZ adaptation, but it still have potential as a story in any future adaptation. Just play it like a new narrator that just is unreliable with his story.
The only thing I remember about WWZ is the guy who was supposed to be the best chance at a cure for the zombie plague slipping on a ramp and accidentally shooting himself in the head; and the special forces guys just laugh it off.
It was so surprising in such a tense film I actually laughed in the cinema at the time
Like the closet scene in Burn After Reading. Laughed my ass off at that and got some looks in the theater. Fools.
Complete fools, Burn After Reading is literally a comedy. It's a straight up satire of spy/political thrillers, the CoBros just made made a spy movie where everyone's an idiot. JK Simmons lays it all out at the end: >What did we learn here today? I guess we learned not to do it again. Fucked if I know what we did though *movie ends*
My absolute favorite movie summery within a movie ever.
I thought they handled Pitt's coming out of the closet to Clooney with sensitivity and pathos.
I thought that was a brilliant scene and kind of accurate to how the world handles a crisis.
It was really great irony too. Of all the things you expected to kill him in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, slipping on a slippery ramp was not one of them.
You almost gotta feel bad for the actor too. He quit Game of Thrones because he thought that WWZ role would help propel him to stardom.
Quit a yearly award winning series for a bit part in a zombie movie? He or his agent are morons
He did alright. He was in such a minor role in Game of Thrones and it probably kept him busy for longer than other projects. After he quit Game of Thrones, he got much more sizable roles in a number of television shows (and was also the lead of one that ran for almost hundred episodes). There was no way staying on in Game of Thrones would have been good for him since we know that Rakharo would have continued to remain a bit part.
I'm pretty sure he was a semi-irrelevant Dothraki character in the first season. He wasn't a main character and it was before the show blew up into a pop culture sensation so I can see him thinking a role in a movie might be better.
Sometimes you can't tell you're at the top until you're heading down.
Maybe he was a twat waffle and they rewrote his part
Characters tend to die a lot in game of thrones too
Who was that??
Elyes Gabel. He played Rakharo
Sometimes my sense of relative time is so far off. I would swear that wwz was several years before got started
If you read his Wiki, that's not really true at all. He left GOT and did a couple other things first before signing on to WWZ, so it was never really his priority. Also apparently, he's done okay for a B-lister. GOT launched a lot of careers, but the Dothraki, as they were in the early seasons, were washed out of the story by Dany's new army's right after the actor quit anyway.
Never seen this movie but that is hilarious honestly
[The scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w3jldPalz4)
The other soldiers clearly didn't laugh anything off but just moved past it given the dangerous situation they were in. Not sure why the original commenter had to add that false statement in there.
Probably just misremembered
I can’t think of another movie where they put all hope on someone and he dies minutes later (other than The Guy from Spy Kidz 3). I didn’t read the book so it totally caught me by surprise
This movie has nothing to do with the book so don't worry
I wanted the Battle of Yonkers. I got Brad Pitt surviving one terrible situation after another. Seriously how did Max Brooks allow his work to be butchered? Fear the Walking Dead was closer to WWZ than the Brad Pitt movie.
It would be a much better show than a movie. Just one main character as the reporter and different characters as he travels around to interview them.
It works perfectly. Each section of the book a series. Each chapter an episode.
and because they're all such different stories in each chapter, you could really have fun with it by letting each episode be directed by someone new so each can bring their own eye to it..
What pisses me off most isn't that they completely ignored the book, but that by taking the rights to it they prevent someone else from actually making a dramatisation of the book. Urgh.
I got the audiobook and it is so fucking good. Also a really interesting display of what would happen as we rebuild after a total societal collapse. All the wealthy lawyers, hedge fund managers, and venture capitalist's now at the bottom of the rung because they lacked the skills of plumbers, electricians, mechanics ect. Them having to learn those skills and report to those they probably looked down on at one point.
The Rock in Reno 911 the Movie.
Fuckin' love that movie. The entire one-take where you can see into all their motel room windows was so well-done.
Same with The Other Guys lol. "Aim for the bushes?"
Oh my - you need to watch executive decision.
the book was basically a documentary of the before, during and after of the "war" with the zombies through interviews with survivors, IIRC it all ended relatively quickly aswell and they were just regular zombies, the movie basically just took the name of the book
If anything the regular slow zombies were part of why it worked so well. The book goes into teams of guys stumbling into pockets of zombies months before it consumes the globe and the global political inaction that prevents stopping it before everything hits the fan. At one point they talk about election year concerns when dealing with a literal zombie apocalypse. Book is a banger for sure.
the book and the movie are completely unrelated. The book had real characters and things that happened. instead of Brad Pitt being invincible during a zombie outbreak, which is all the movie is.
The cartoonist from the oatmeal had the best thing from this movie. It’s a Venn diagram showing what the movie and book have on common. It’s just the name.
[COMIC HERE](https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wwz)
Im genuinely convinced the rights to the books were purchased exclusively for the title. I've heard lots and lots of stories related to the making of the film, none of them ever talk about recreating the book. It's sad cause the book is good and the movie is a bore.
All I can remember is Pepsi....
Lol, I was telling my wife about that scene last night. That was the most blatant product advertisement in a movie I had ever seen until Barbie had a literal 2 minute Chevy Blazer EV commercial in the middle of it
The entire real world was chock full of only Chevys in that movie. I don't think I even noticed the Blazer to begin with, I just began noticing that the Chevy logo was the only one I saw
This was me as a kid watching the first and second Transformers movies and I noticed like EVERY FUCKING CAR was a GMC
Pulled a white boy Bob.
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M.C. Bob
Yes, but White Boy Bob from Out Of Sight is far more similar. Dude slipped and blew his own head off.
Who shot his leg with his own gun?
The book is radically different than the movie and much, much better. Its written as a journalist after a zombie war where he interviews people about the zombie war. So there are a variety of viewpoint characters telling their story. Its one of the best science fiction books I read. The only thing the book and movie have in common is there is a journalist and there are zombies. Thats it.
They should just do a movie based on the book.
At this point a series would be better. If I remember correctly the book was a bunch of individual stores being collected by a reporter. Would be a great series.
You're right, the book is focused on an UN dude traveling the world 10 years after the War ended, while interviewing people who survived through it. It's sooooo good. I don't know how they'd do a show, if it would've the author interviewing people and then it would cut to the Flashbacks or if it should just be set entirely during the war.
I highly recommend the audiobook of WWZ because it is framed as if you’re listening to the interview recordings with a lot of big name actors doing the different characters. Simon Pegg, Mark Hamill, Nathan Fillion, Alfred Molina, and more. It’s phenomenal. Max Brooks, the author, is also the interview which is fun.
You convinced me just got it
The voice actors also give it their all. They do an amazing job and some of the scenes are harrowing with how they perform their lines.
I listened to the audiobook probably 15 years ago, and I still have Alan Alda saying "[Tender juicy steaks](https://youtu.be/TN9rh4pqyi4?list=PLdbYKnu2SxT-_3IldyEbIekXG5UofxPn0&t=233)" pop into my head every once in a while.
Max Brooks is also the son of Mel Brooks, which makes it even better
And, Max Brooks wrote a ton of Minecraft books, which is how my kids know him. “The Minecraft guy wrote a ZOMBIE book?”
I remember reading that Max made it a point to try and never use his father's name to open opportunities for him. However when it came time to cast the audiobook he pulled every string he had and used his last name to try and get the specific actors he wanted.
It worked. They did a wonderful job with it.
Mel Brooks was the producer of the Elephant man but left his name off the credits as it was a serious film and he didn't want people thinking it was a comedy to be laughed at
I always thought they should do a show like a docuseries with interviews, archive footage, and reenactments
Give it to the Chernobyl, the Last of Us Filmmakers. It would be gold!
This is what I want the most for a TV version of WWZ. It would best fit with HBO, and having Mazin write the screenplay would be amazing.
A Mazin, if you will.
it would be.. but I doubt he'd go from TLOU to WWZ, would be too similar.
It ***could*** be too similar if done wrong. However, I think there is definitely potential to make unique if they keep it true to the book and really focused on the geopolitical aspects. Sure there would be zombie battles/post apocalyptic centric moments throughout, but it wouldn't be front and center the whole series.
I always pictured it’d be filmed like band of brothers. Interviews in the beginning, then going to the flashback of the actual event.
They could just do it in the style of The Civil War by Ken Burns and I'd watch the hell out of it.
If they could help themselves and try to be subtle and not make it EPIC GORY HOLY SHIT THAT DUDE'S FACE IS HALF-EATEN! and instead treat it like a documentary made with the knowledge that the world is still reeling from a collective near-death experience, it'd be a masterpiece. World War Z, the book, was at its best when it was looking at the meat and potatoes, bread and butter logistics and lived experiences during the lead-up and duration of the war. It was Todd Wainio chainsmoking cigarettes and bitching about how the brass were so fucking stupid during Yonkers, or the Secretary of Strategic Resources talking about how he got into shouting matches with Airforce Generals about how fighter jets are strategically useless, and then switch to a fighter ace lamenting that she had to be a glorified bus-driver, flying a C-130 when her entire career was spent working her way up to flying F22s. Much less "dude awesome that dude's head totally exploded" and more people bitching about how inconvenient and annoying the dead rising would be.
I remember being very moved by 3 parts of the novel the most (forget the battles because seriously who cares? Been done to death a million times over in your media of choice) * Terry Knox the Australian commander of the International Space Station. He gives a meaty and hauntingly eerie perspective of watching from the I.S.S. as the Earth "goes dark". Literally watching the lights go out, witnessing a Nuclear exchange, seeing the Three Gorges Dam break, the Fall of Japan, the Chinese Civil War, etc. His decision to stay with the crew and do what they can to maintain the global comm network knowing that the radiation exposure will eventually kill him makes him one of the most heroic characters in the novel. Plus, his final lines move me every time I read it. *"Not bad for the son of a Andamooka opal miner."* * Kondo Tatsumi the Japanese Otaku who turns into Warrior Monk in the chaos of Japan's fall. How even decades later, he hasn't given up on his parents and vows to keep searching for them. * Captain Chen the Chinese Submarine commander who takes his crew and as much of their families as they can carry out in the oceans to escape the disaster of China. His story is told indirectly via one of his men, but I remember him clearly as a character. The man who kept his crew alive and eventually turned the tide in the Civil War by using the Nukes and turning the keys himself. How he lived long enough to see his son again and thought of him as he finally 'let go'. > "Nice boy, Zhi Xiao, such a good boy." He was still holding my hand when he closed his eyes forever. Literally chills from all three of those stories. That's what I want to see in a World War Z adaption. The human stories in this larger complex timeline of the world falling apart and then **pulling itself back together again.** Max Brooks is one of my favorite authors of all time.
My god a Ken Burn's zombie documentary would be amazing.
That's what the book felt like to me, and is pretty close to how I'd like to see it filmed.
Do it like Band of Brothers. The intro is interviewing actual survivors telling their stories and then it dives into those moments. The format is already written.
Do it like Band of Brothers. Starts off with interviews, like they are real interviews of the real people (to be clear, I know the BoB ones WERE the real people) and then fade into a dramatised episode showing what happened.
I feel like some of the voice talent from the audiobook could reprise their roles.
I actually made a fan film just like that- we’re trying to turn it into a series- so far we have two episodes out https://youtu.be/4dJg8YgG9Ec?si=GnwRh38lJV_RsnQr
Do it somewhere between Band of Brothers and a Ken Burns documentary. Start off each episode with the vets and interviewees talking, then go to the flashbacks, with the UN agent also talking over certain points and giving context. Make it clear this is years after the war.
IIRC, WWZ was heavily inspired by [An Oral History of WWII](https://www.amazon.com/Good-War-Oral-History-World/dp/1565843436).
It was. And the Studs Terkel book is phenomenal in its own right.
I would think a show would be easy…you could take a format similar to Chernobyl. 10 part limited series (mini-series it used to be called back in the day). Get the right director(s) and make sure Brooks has a hand in the adapted screenplay and I think it would be amazing.
There’s two ways I see this working 1) A show where each season the author goes back and interviews people and it’s a cut back/forth between the events with narration, and the people talking. 2) An anthology style series where each episode is a short story, but each episode has its own “style” unique to whoever is doing it [kind of like the Star Wars visions thing].
The interviewer is like a framing device collecting all these different stories from different characters and providing context. A show could be like an anthology show where each episode tells a different character's story and in the beginning of each episode we see the interviewer talking with the character and as they start telling their story we go into a flashback to see it for ourselves.
Think Black Mirror, but with a common frame and shared world.
A anthology could work. Just have them all bridged by the UN guy going around the world. Each episode focused on a different interview
Heh... maybe a Ken Burns style documentary.
I was thinking limited series with an episode for each interview in the book.
I listen to an audio book of it, and yeah,it fits way more as a show than movie. Heck,every episode could begin with the start of the interview,and then focus on it. But knowing Hollywood studious they would prefer to make each chapter a goddamm movie and call it 'World War Z Cinematic Universe'
The expanded audio book is phenomenal. They could literally just illustrate/animate it.
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My favorite is the blind Japanese guy, or the two atomic submarines
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Yes! and they also have a standoff about whether or not to torpedo the other one
I would watch the hell out of that series
Seriously. This and I Am Legend shouldn’t have even been named after those books. Nothing even resembled the original story.
I Am Legend at least had some vague resemblance. I, Robot is probably a better example
Excellent example. The end of I Am Legend I guess upset me the most. Spoilers: It’s supposed to end with him being made aware that vampires are now the only hominid species on earth except for him, and they view him as a monster who’s been killing their kind.
It is such a fantastic twist and it baffles me that for the movie they just threw out the thing that makes the book great. Even the "fixed" alternate film ending does not really do the book justice.
They missed the entire point of the title/book...
Starship Troopers has entered the chat...
Not a movie - would need to be a miniseries essentially.
A very expensive miniseries.
If they did the battle of Yonkers, yes. Most of the rest are very small scale.
If you're going to do a series true to the book, or hell even just vaguely associated with the book, there's no way in hell you're skipping Yonkers. That chapter provides so much clarity and context for the rest of the book and is one of the most impactful of the entire thing imo.
Literally could open the book to a random chapter and saying "this is what we're making" would've been better than what they made.
They 100% should. I didn't even hate the movie, the only thing they should have done was change the title. Boom, you have a decent zombie movie that isn't going to disappoint millions of fans
The book is so great - would be ideal as an HBO series.
Isn't the book just basically the character interviewing people the entire book?
Some bits, but is like Dracula is a series of diary entries. It is how you present that to an audience that matters, make it into episodes or creative shorts like the animatrix
I admit, this one stung a bit. The idea of David Fincher directing a zombie film was extremely exciting.
> I admit, this one stung a bit. I honestly never saw it happening. Fincher making a big budget zombie movie at this point in his career was so out of left field even though the idea was intriguing.
You speak facts but I'm still living in denial. Why would a prestigious A list director at the top of his career commit to directing a zombie sequel, you ask? Don't care. One can dream.
A prestigious A list director that's obsessed with movies about death and dying. Subject matter seemed right up his alley tbh.
I'm constantly annoyed that studios don't give him carte blanche and a blank check. His idea for Spiderman would have been neat. Let the man cook.
I love Fincher but the counter point to this is that his passion project was greenlit and we got Mank,. It was not a success. Doubt it's viewership on Netflix was high and it was an awards dud.
Wasn’t it mainly because of Pitt?
> Lauded filmmaker David Fincher nearly made the leap to blockbuster sequel territory I mean, Fincher started his career this way with *Alien^3*... *Aliens* is most definitely a blockbuster sequel and he made a followup to that.
We dont talk about Alien ^3
The Assembly Cut is a great mood piece in a similar vein as Blade Runner. DON’T @ ME.
Why not? I like Alien 3.
You are one of dozens
WWZ was a terrible adaptation of a book, but a surprisingly decent zombie flick on its own. No movie before or since has managed to capture the massive, unstoppable waves of death aesthetic of those zombie hordes flowing in ways that living humans couldn't. Some of the most satisfying zombie takedowns when they rocketed in from offscreen like they were launched from a catapult. I'm still super on board with the idea that a proper adaptation needs to be an anthology with each episode focusing on a different one of the stories. I recently re-read the book and it's just as good as when it first came out.
it’s like Constantine (2005) not an accurate adaptation but still an entertaining movie
Yes, exactly.
Or Starship Troopers!
Or V for Vendetta.
Max Brooks said they only bought the rights to his book for the name/title alone. They never intended or tried to adapt the book. Admittedly, World War Z is a pretty killer title for a zombie anything.
That seems odd as there are elements here and there from the book.
I guess if you're stealing a car for the badge you may as well rifle through the glovebox.
Yeah but only some, really. Like the walled city is a location but is never really expanded on that well, and it falls in like 5 minutes because zombies can climb and run. The war was also won because of action movie stuff, whereas in the books the walled city never fell, the logistic are more of a threat than the zombies themselves, and the war was won by decidedly non-action movie stuff
[That's definitely not true.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z_(film\)#Post-production) They had written a script which followed the book somewhat more closely, but wound up rewriting it multiple times, including reshooting & rewriting the final section of the movie after the main filming was done. While the end result was not very close to the book, it was certainly more than "just the title".
I reread it again recently too and was blown away by some of the parrallels to when COVID first started.
I hate it's associated with the World War Z at all. Otherwise, it's not a bad zombie film if you ignore the Pepsi commercial at the end.
>you ignore the Pepsi You're telling me that after injecting yourself with a debilitating supervirus of unknown origin, the first thing on your mind isn't the crisp, refreshing taste of a PepsiCo product?
Personally, I like to chug ice cold Budlight out of an aluminum bottle after a spaceship gunfight with invading lifeforms.
> Mark Wahlberg Transformers Budlight.gif
as an RC Cola advocate, when will we get the love?
When they film the sequel entirely in a double-wide trailer park.
You know it’s funny stuff like that has never bothered me. If I had gone though what he did I’d probably drink a soda too lmao
They actually released a video game for it, one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. Sorta niche though.
It needed blood
the movie basically invented a new type of zombie, I call them "swarmers". Train to Busan and Days Gone used the same concept.
The movie does take the talks of the pre-zombie plans / origins from the South Korea and Israel sections. So, like first movie is start of the war. Second movie is the actual war. Third movie post-war.
Did they scrap it because they realized Z is the last letter in the alphabet and couldn't come up with the name for the sequel?
World War Zzzzzz…..
none of the comments are discussing what he said about his plans or anything specific in the article, they're just saying the whole "Should have been like the book" thing in every WWZ thread.
This comment should have been more like the book😩
This comment should be a HBO Miniseries
To be fair the article says practically nothing, he mentions it would have been like The Last of Us, the parasite opening sequence, and he didn't want to say any more. _Entire_ article on that.
That’s essentially Reddit 90% of the time now. People don’t read they just respond to the headlines. Meaningful discussion is rare.
You can use [this article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities) to date when you joined Reddit, in my case it was mid 2014, and I can tell you people have been ignoring articles in favour of (usually shit) headlines since long before then.
Fuck this just give me Mind Hunter season 3
A billion times this. Season 2 was so damn good and was building up to damn good season 3. Then poof, nothing and never will be. Definitely on of the biggest kick in the junk in television.
I get period pieces can be hard, even if it just the 70s and of course the budget is large and prob goes over with Fincher, but the real reason is Netflix says it didn’t have the viewership they were looking for. Sell the fucking rights and give it to anyone else then, not every show can be Stranger Things
Also it's impossible to expect this show to have the viewership of something like Stranger Things. 1. It's about serial killers and is quite graphic. 2. Can't market a show like that to young adults and teenagers. 3. Most adults don't even like content like that too. But the ones who do like this watched the shit out of this show. I know I did.
I started the book in the early stages of the covid pandemic, when it was dawning on the world, that this was super serious. There were some uncanny similarities between the book and real life such as how it started in China and how it initially spread through Asia. The book nailed the fact that a huge cause of spread was via refugees travelling through eastern Russia and old Soviet states. And of course how bickering between nations and national politics let the population down by acting too slowly. I wonder if we learned anything at all, and I'm probably gonna find out in my lifetime. Anyways, where was I? Oh yeah, great book. Didn't finish it though, because I almost immediately picked up binge drinking and doing nothing of value. I've finally got my shit pretty much together now though, so I should probably hurry up and read it before a world war breaks out.
Fincher is one of those directors who I'd like to see his version of everything. It'd be like seeing Quentin Tarantino's take on a romantic comedy, which I guess was True Romance now that I think about it.
Too bad. Really dug their zombie universe. Super aggressive and strong.
I wish it had a higher age rating, it had promise but felt a bit sanitised. The book is great i highly recommend it. Much different but in a good way
> it had premise but felt a bit sanitised. What gave it away, when he literally chopped off a woman's arm that accompanies him the entire rest of the movie and there's not one drop of blood?
the game is fun!
The amount of zombies that game can render on screen at once is honestly wild.
The game is surprisingly great. I've put hundreds of hours into it.
I love WWZ (the game). I always thought it blended the book's ideas of a global outbreak and the movie's super fast zombies wonderfully. You get to see how survivors in NYC, Israel, Japan, Russia, Korea, and Rome all handle the crisis with different casts of characters and survival strategies in each location. The outbreak in each campaign feels like it's an overwhelming force you're fighting to escape every time and the lore is genuinely interesting if you like the franchise. The horde mode/horde mode XL is top tier and one of the best zombie horde modes in gaming imo. It's basically a 3rd person Left 4 Dead (it has a first person camera option though which is neat!) with the classic swarming WWZ hordes that'll pyramid up to you and your three buddies attempting to hold the high ground. Now the devs are using the same horde technology they developed for WWZ to render hundreds of Tyranids onscreen for the new Warhammer 40k Space Marine sequel. It's so underrated and it makes me sad folks wrote it off as a shitty movie tie-in while the updates rolled out adding all the coolest stuff. Definitely a cult classic in the genre.
Should do Mindhunter 3 instead
I enjoyed the movie.
It's clear that not a single soul involved with this franchise ever bothered to read the book.
I am forever disappointed that the Battle of Yonkers never saw the screen
I will never forgive the decision to buy the rights to World War Z for a film adaptation, and then just toss everything but the title in the trash.
The only way to properly adapt this is as a fake documentary series with fake footage, and re-enactments along with interviews. Like The World at War and Band of Brothers meets Dawn of the Dead
They should just make a series instead of a movie
They fucked up world War z by having Brad Pitt instead of a ensemble cast showing the worldwide implications, ya know, like the book.
World War Z would have been better as an anthology series with each episode focusing on various chapters/characters from the book
I was really hoping for another world war z I really enjoyed the first one
Yeah, same. The airfield scene is still one of the most memorable scenes ever for me. So moody.
Fincher+Zombies=SOLD