David Fincher has always seemed to me like an auteur kind of director who makes pretty much whatever he wants to. So it’s always felt like an odd decision for him to take the reins of World War Z 2, a sequel to a middlingly received 2013 zombie film that most people have completely forgotten.
But he (and frequent collaborator Brad Pitt) have signed on the dotted line for the pic, and apparently they’re stuck pondering exactly what to do with it. In an interview with Little White Lies about Mindhunter, he was asked for an update on the project and simply said:
“We’re trying. A lot of stones have been laid. We’re just deconstructing it right now against the mythology that exists to see where we can go.”
You might think a zombie film plot is a no-brainer – just chuck a load of zombies at some actors, throw in a few buckets of blood and give someone a shotgun – but World War Z 2 has a global scope and is a touch more complex. Even so, it’s not exactly the deepest of narratives, but it’s successfully stumped everyone that’s come at it since production began in 2016.
Paramount are sure to be having unpleasant flashbacks to what happened with the first film right about now, which was plagued by numerous production nightmares and endless reshoots to get the movie in working order. This all caused the project’s budget to balloon to $190 million, and it only just squeaked into profit once all was said and done.
But hey, David Fincher has yet to properly let me down, and him applying his rigorous style to genre horror (we’ll leave aside Alien 3) should be an enticing prospect.
