Let’s face it, the studios all hope that any new film they release will be successful enough to spawn a franchise. It should come as no surprise then that Paramount has plans to expand their upcoming adaption of Max Brooks’ zombie novel World War Z into a trilogy if the film turns out to be a hit.
The news comes from a LA Times interview with World War Z star and producer Brad Pitt, with the paper describing the film’s tone as having “the grounded, gun-metal realism of, say, [Matt] Damon’s Jason Bourne [film] series tethered to the unsettling end-times vibe of AMC’s The Walking Dead.”
In the film, direct by Quantum Of Solace‘s Marc Forster, Pitt is playing Gerry Lane, a UN fact finder racing to the cause of a zombie outbreak that threatens the globe.
Given the nature of Brooks’ book, there is certainly a lot of material to plumb for potential sequels. For the uninitiated, the book is presented as a collection of records, interviews and documents gathered after the zombie outbreak had been contained that attempts to explain how the situation spread out of control. The original screenplay for the project by J. Michael Straczynski kept this conceit and had its main character traveling the country collecting the stories and documents that are found in the book. Reportedly, script rewrites from Matthew Michael Carnahan have given the film a more straightforward narrative structure, which I have to confess I find the prospect of a bit disappointing. If enough people by tickets next December following the film’s release we’ll get to see how they intend to take the book and flesh out a further story.
