Any conversation about what could be named as the single most tortured production ever mounted simply wouldn’t be complete without a mention of Marc Forster’s World War Z, which seemed to fall into some kind of trouble at every turn.
Looking back at everything the cast and crew had to endure, it’s incredible to think that not only was the end product actually a pretty damn entertaining horror-tinged blockbuster, but it also ended up as the highest-grossing zombie movie in history made after earning a stellar $540 million at the box office.
Nobody could have seen that coming based on the constant tales of behind the scenes woe, which saw the initial budget of $125 million tossed out of the window very quickly, with some insiders and analysts estimating that World War Z may have run up production costs as high as an eye-watering $269 million.
That would sort of make sense when you consider seven weeks of reshoots took place, which included a massively expensive action sequence being shot and then never used, while Drew Goddard was hired to rewrite the script’s rewrites after Damon Lindelof ran out of time due to his other commitments, and the sheer volume of work that the screenplay required.
It was a wild ride to say the least, and we hope Matthew Fox at least got some decent residuals for his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo, but streaming subscribers can freeze frame it all they like, and there’s a lot of them checking out the film this weekend.
As per FlixPatrol, World War Z has shuffled back onto the Paramount Plus most-watched charts, allowing viewers to revisit an absolute disaster of a shoot that yielded an inexplicably above-average epic, even if any hope of a sequel looks to be definitely dead in the water.
