After many stories of its troubled production and its near complete reworking of Max Brooks’s popular novel, the worldwide success of World War Z last year took many critics, pundits and audience members by surprise. The film starred Brad Pitt as an amorphously defined important world investigator man who traveled the globe to determine the origin of a mass zombie outbreak and save the human race. Despite the film’s popularity, original director Marc Forster will not return for the follow-up, and has been replaced by “Penny Dreadful” director J.A. Bayona. Brad Pitt is expected to return as the world investigator man with awesome hair.
Now, an important new member of the World War Z sequel‘s production has finally been hired: an actual screenwriter, and a damned good one at that. Variety reports that A History of Violence and Eastern Promises scribe Steven Knight will write the follow-up, which is expected to once again use Max Brooks’s novel as a vague jumping off point for whatever the hell Paramount and Skydance want to do against the backdrop of a big budget zombie apocalypse.
It’s been a good year for Steven McKnight already: his second directorial effort, Locke, was released in April to widespread acclaim from most critics and a merely favorable review from CraveOnline, which said that the one-man movie that featured Tom Hardy in a car – for the entire running time – simply “runs out of gas.”
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
