‘World War Z’ Sequel Gets Brad Pitt and ‘Conclave’ Director
Brad Pitt is returning for a World War Z sequel at Paramount, and Edward Berger is directing. Deadline reported it Friday, and Variety carried the same details the same day.
The pairing is not a cold call. Pitt and Berger just finished The Riders for A24, which shot earlier this year and sits in post-production now. Berger is the German filmmaker behind All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave, which is to say he is best known for wringing tension out of institutions under pressure. A zombie pandemic is an institution under pressure. It just bites.
He also has horror on his résumé already. Before the Oscar run, Berger directed episodes of AMC’s The Terror in 2018, the premiere among them, on a series about two Royal Navy ships frozen into the Arctic ice and something outside them taking the crew apart one at a time. He has pointed a camera at people dying slowly in the cold before.
Who Is Writing the Zombies
Dennis Kelly is writing the screenplay, and there is more reason for horror fans to care about that than a one-line credit suggests. Kelly created Utopia, the Channel 4 conspiracy thriller that ran two series before its 2014 cancellation and is still passed around as one of the most upsetting things British television has put on air. He also co-created The Third Day, the 2020 HBO and Sky Atlantic series that stranded Jude Law on an island with a community disinclined to let him leave. Critics filed that one under folk horror.
Kelly’s other best-known credit is the book for Matilda the Musical, which won him a Tony. That is a range.
Plan B Is Producing
Pitt produces alongside Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner of Plan B, with Berger attached as an executive producer. Paramount has not announced a title, a release date, or a single plot detail.
The Sequel That Kept Dying
The first World War Z arrived in 2013 under Marc Forster, and its production is a case study in how expensive a troubled third act can get. Matthew Michael Carnahan wrote the original script, Damon Lindelof came aboard in June 2012 to rework the ending, and Drew Goddard finished the rewrite when Lindelof ran out of time. Reshoots pushed the budget to roughly $190 million. It took $540 million worldwide and remains the highest-grossing zombie movie ever released.
David Fincher was confirmed to direct a follow-up in June 2017, with Pitt returning. Paramount cancelled it in February 2019, and reporting at the time pointed at the budget. The project has been quiet ever since, which makes this the second serious run at a sequel in nine years.
Max Brooks’s 2006 novel is built as a set of interviews conducted after the war is already over, hopping between countries and survivors. The 2013 film threw most of that structure out and handed Pitt a single United Nations investigator, Gerry Lane, chasing his family across the same map. Whether Berger and Kelly reach back toward the book’s shape is the most interesting open question on the table, and nobody has answered it.
Nothing here is dated yet. We keep the upcoming horror movies release calendar current as titles firm up. For a zombie outbreak you can actually watch this month, start with our Fantastic Fest review of Resident Evil.
