World War Z movie FAIL

My understanding is that to get investors you need to package your movie in such a way as to be able to pitch something they can see an audience for. For example:

“It’s based on the best selling book”- built in audience “Brad Pitt’s producing and starring in it”- built in audience “about zombies”- zombies are hot right now “special effects depicting the end of the world”- disaster porn built in audience…

No where in there is “faithful to the source material” necessary to get financing unfortunately.

The script (according to the brief bit of info I looked up a long time ago) has had multiple rewrites and been in movie purgatory for years.

With even a sparse Google search and a short trailer, it’s not very far fetched to assume that this will be very little like the source material.

Okay, but it’s reasonable to assume that some of those rewrites may have been more similar, right? Should they have unbought the rights to the novel?

Yeah, the upside potential is all in the pitch process. Especially for big budget blockbusters, Hollywood is terrified of taking a risk on new stories. Anything that has a proven track record automatically has a leg up.

Presumably some iterations along the way must have been. Not knowing the specifics, it’s just hard to fathom how it ended up with that trailer.

But hey, nobody ever said that the business of movies has to make sense.

The main disappointment for me is that the odds of ever seeing a faithful adaptation is very unlikely now. I’d think that it would have been very suited to an HBO series and that episodic format could have been terrific.

It’s definitely a difficult book to translate into a conventional film narrative, so an episodic format would have been more effective to incorporate more of the book.

Two of the worst (least faithful) adaptations of popular books ever were Jaws and Jurassic Park, and a lot of people liked those movies anyway.

Two of the worst (least faithful) adaptations of popular books ever were Jaws and Jurassic Park, and a lot of people liked those movies anyway.

I think it’s a bit of a stretch to rank them among the very least faithful of adaptations. It’s been a long while since I’ve read them but the films are certainly more faithful than, say, most PK Dick adaptations, which usually take the basic premise and then go hog wild.

Those two are perfect examples of movies that improved on the original books.

Just like this one no doubt will.

Actually, if you’re talking about this thread, which I just browsed through, there doesn’t really seem to be any consensus, besides the writing being bad. A lot of people in that thread say they liked the book, and most of the really negative comments are from the same handful of posters.

Tell that to my 12-year-old self, who was totally pissed that the pterodactyl attack was missing from the movie.

Producers and Lindelof spilled their guts to Vanity Fair.

“It was, like, wow. The ending of our movie doesn’t work,” Evans recalled after watching a director’s cut of the blockbuster hopeful. “I believed in that moment we needed to reshoot the movie.”

So Lindelof gave them two options – or “roads,” rather – to fix the disasterous adaptation of Max Brooks’ novel of the same name.

“I said to them, ‘There are two roads to go down here.’ Is there material that can be written to make that stuff work better? To have it make sense? To have it have emotional stakes? And plot logic and all that? And Road Two, which I think is the long-shot road, is that everything changes after Brad leaves Israel.”

The film follow’s Pitt’s character, a United Nations bureaucrat, tasked with finding a way to stop a zombie pandemic from decimating all of humanity. Lindelof’s plan B (also the name of Pitt’s production company) required cutting a 12-minute battle in Russia and crafting a new ending, instead.

“I didn’t think anyone was going to say, ‘Let’s throw it out and try something else,’” Lindelof continued to recall. “So when I gave them those two roads and they sounded more interested in Road B. I was like, ‘To be honest with you, good luck selling that to Paramount.’”

But the extra money to shoot an additional 30-40 minutes of footage in order to make a new ending make sense was not the only expense that Paramount is blaming for the budget ballooning to somewhere around $200 million.

The wrap-up crew closing down production in Malta found forgotten purchase orders for cast and extras that totaled in the millions. Evans called the overages an “unthinkable action.”

“It was literally insane,” Evans said. “Adam and I believed we’d gotten out of Malta good, and I found out we weren’t. That is a nightmare.”

Well now I have to see it.

Lol, shooting 30-40 minutes of new footage isn’t a new ending! That’s at least a third to almost half of a typical movie. And now I want to see that Russia battle. I’m imagining a last ditch defense by the Russians that involves unleashing an entire division’s worth of anti-personnel bears with sharpened claws and lasers attached to their heads.

Oooh. I hope they’re riding bicycles.

This proposed ending is probably 10x better than what we are actually going to see.

I like zombies as much as the next guy, but…

I mean, calling in Lindelof to bail out the ending of the movie.

I think you need Bizarro-Lindelof for that.

haha yeah, that is beyond bizarre.

— Alan

That movie poster cat is craaaaaazzzzyyyyy

Perhaps there is some weird property of Lindelof physics that results in him only being able to deliver satisfying endings when he isn’t involved with the writing from the start. Maybe if he doesn’t spend all his time thinking of Questions, he will have time to deliver some answers.

Not betting Euros that actually happens, though.