Earlier this week we found out that director Marc Forster’s adaption of Max Brooks’ book World War Z had been scheduled for a rather unprecedented seven weeks of reshoots later in the fall. It turns out that the person who will be scripting those reshoots will be Prometheus scribe Damon Lindelof. Paramount is hoping that he will be able to deliver the goods to get what is obviously a very troubled production back on track.
At the time the reshoots were announced, I noted that seven weeks is a good part of a regular film’s production schedule, so it looks like they are giving it a fairly extensive overhaul. The Hollywood Reporter has noted that Lindelof’s rewrites will be focusing on the film’s third act, but I suspect that in order to rebuild that section of the film he will need to shore up the first two as well.
Now some screenwriters will tell you that endings are indeed the hardest part of writing a script, but to me that only would seem to be the case if there were problems if things weren’t properly set up in the first part of the script. And the fact that no one seems to have realized that their were such integral structural problems with the screenplay before now is rather worrisome. And potentially a rather costly mistake for the production and for studio Paramount.
