Troubled ‘World War Z’ Now Saddled with Weeks of Reshoots and Damon Lindelof-Penned Rewrite

By  · Published on June 9th, 2012

Late last week, the Daily Mail reported that Marc Forster’s World War Z was set to undergo some massive reshoots in Budapest this fall, with the venerable Baz Bamigboye reporting that the production, wrapped for almost a year, was set to film for a boggling seven additional weeks. And now it looks like things are getting even worse for the Brad Pitt-starring adaptation, because those reshoots will apparently come care of screenwriter Damon Lindelof.

The Hollywood Reporter has word that Lindelof has been tapped “to save” the production. He will reportedly focus on the film’s third act – which is deeply hilarious if one considers his apparent inability to really take things past the finish line (yes, I am talking about Prometheus, a film I was fully invested in until its third act, and even LOST and Cowboys & Aliens to varying degrees).

The film has already been plagued by potential problems, including the delayed delivery of its first rejiggered script from Matthew Michael Carnahan, who was working off of some drafts by J. Michael Straczynski and the hard fact that World War Z the movie just didn’t sound like “World War Z” the beloved novel by Max Brooks. The main issue – how do you turn a book that’s about a post-zombie outbreak world into a movie about a world in the throes of a zombie outbreak? Oh, and also, how exactly do you focus the action all on one man, even if it is Brad Pitt?

Other details on the reshoots are still not very clear and it’s unknown if Pitt’s other co-stars (such as Matthew Fox, James Badge Dale, Anthony Mackie, and Mireille Enos) would be coming back for the fresh filming, but with so much time and apparently so much new material, it seems inevitable that they would. At the very least, the film does have a solid cast and some great source material, so perhaps it can be saved – even with outsized remakes and a potentially fatal script doctoring.

The film’s release was previously moved from this December to June 21, 2013.

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