By all rights, World War Z should have been dead on arrival.
Based on the Max Brooks' novel of the same name, World War Z is a globe spanning, Hollywood big budget summer blockbuster. The kind of film that comes out every year. The movie had two things going for it, one was lead actor Brad Pitt attached to the project and two was the strength of the book itself, also a globe spanning affair detailing the rise of the zombie apocalypse from a U.N. inspector's after action reports.
Brad Pitt plays the aforementioned U.N. inspector. But in the movie, his goal is to find a cure. The movie begins in Philadelphia, putting Pitt's family smack dab in the center of the American outbreak of very fast zombies (unlike the novel's slow zombies). Like its terrific predecessors in seriously good zombie flicks 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later, World War Z's zombies are fast and their bite turns victims into mindless machines in 12 seconds. It's big budget Hollywood summer action. And all signs pointed to it being awful. Rewrites, delays, and a severe side track from the book's scenes all suggested a bust. But the movie's success shows some positive trends in Hollywood that haven't always been successful.
It was a pet project.
Actors and actresses get paid ludicrous amounts of money to do what they do. And many movies get greenlit just because a famous name has attached themselves to the project. At the same time, many Hollywood A-listers start their own production companies to make movies starring, guess who? Them. The most famous probably being Tom Cruise's production company keeping Mission: Impossible going (and making it better). Brad Pitt was the one who attached himself to World War Z. Is anyone else surprised by that? A multiple academy award nominee (and multiple academy award snub-ee), and one of the greatest actors of his generation, wanted to star in a zombie movie. He used his money to buy the rights, and his fame to get people to go out to see it.
It had to be rewritten.
Putting aside the movie's complete disregard for almost anything in the book, World War Z started out with a pretty cool trailer. Again, Brad Pitt starring in a big budget zombie film that wasn't a comedy. But then rumors started to swirl. Production was halted, the ending was so poor they brought in extra screenwriters to rework the last third of the film. Reshoots had to be done. It was sounding like a train wreck. Fans of the book were even more distraught. And even though the final trailer was fairly epic in scale, it looked so poorly CGI'ed that I wondered what in the world they had spent almost $200 million on. It was a disaster waiting to happen. A giant money pit that only Brad Pitt could potentially rise out of. But then the movie released to both critical and commercial success. After all that had happened, people actually went out to see the movie, and they liked it!
It's still a pretty good movie.
Not just fans, but critics too generally approved of World War Z. Besides almost pointless association with the book because they have nothing in common and some light clichés and dialogue choices, World War Zwas a pretty fun movie. It takes about 10 minutes before the first zombies show up. And they are almost nonstop from there. From thrilling escapes through Philadelphia and Jerusalem, to quite encounters in South Korea and Wales, to the incredibly tense zombie breakout in an airplane midflight, World War Z isn't short on thrills. Nor is it short on scares. Despite being PG-13, and blocking out a whole lot of zombie headshots I'm sure everyone wanted to see in full glory, the movie is as tense and action packed as it should be. And if you look up how the movie was supposed to originally end, I think we can all agree that what was put to theaters is a lot better than what could've been.
Now we know that instead of pushing a product out that isn't ready, movie producers are looking at what they have, deciding it's not good enough and going back to the drawing board. Of course, they are probably in it for the money, but if that means a better movie come opening day, I'm all for it.
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