Paramount Comes Unthinkably Close to Eradicating the World War Z Film Adaptation from Existence

Vulture reported on Monday that Paramount Pictures is likely to cancel production plans for the eagerly anticipated adaptation of Max Brooks’ zombie apocalypse novel World War Z. Despite the recent success of zombie films, the novel itself, and AMC’s The Walking Dead cable series – Paramount will walk away from the zombie epic should they be unable to find a co-financier. With a budget estimated at upwards of $125 million dollars, even the presence of marketable assets like Brad Pitt and Marc Forster (the Moby look-alike who directed Quantum of Solace and, more impressively, Stranger than Fiction.) might not be enough to save the film

Should the film even survive and get made – it will carry a PG-13 rating – which guarantees that it would leave fans of the novel utterly disappointed. The book – loosely inspired by Studs Terkel’s Pulitizer Prize winning The Good War: An Oral History of World War 2 – contains scenes of drug use, apocalyptic sex, and, of course, extreme, gruesome blood-shed; little of which, would survive a PG-13 cut. So perhaps Max Brooks fan-boys should regard this news as secretly propitious. Frankly, no matter how cool it would be to watch zombies besiege castles, attack submarines and over-run the US military at Yonkers – a bloodless version of World War Z on the big screen qualifies as “must-miss” in my book. At least we’ll always have the thoroughly excellent audio-book to fall back on.