Are you dead tired of zombie stories? Do you wish Hollywood would stop beating the reanimated corpse of that infected horse? Paramount either doesn’t believe you exist or doesn’t care. The studio has signed Brad Pitt to star in a sequel to World War Z from the director of Conclave.
Deadline reports Paramount has “closed a deal” with Pitt to reprise his role as Gerry Lane in World War Z 2: Zombie Boogaloo. (Not the actual title, but we can hope.) The studio has also signed Edward Berger to direct. The sequel will see him and Pitt quickly reunite after they finished filming A24’s upcoming The Riders earlier this year. Dennis Kelly (Utopia, Matilda: The Musical) will write the script.
Deadline says Pitt began pitching Berger on the movie early on during their work on The Riders and the deal recently came together after years in limbo. Work on a sequel to the 2013 film has long been a passion project for Pitt. At one point he developed a followup with David Fincher that almost happened before budget issues stopped it.
The surprise is not that it’s now happening but that it took this long. The first movie—very loosely based on Max Brooks’ popular 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War—earned $540 million at the worldwide box office despite middling reviews from both critics and audiences.
The film ended with Pitt’s United Nations investigator helping to barely avoid a planet-destroying zombie pandemic, a premise that was a lot more fun in 2013 (a.k.a. “the before times). As for what could cause a second Zombie World War to breakout after Gerry Lane helped discover a pathogen that kept humans safe is unknown. There are no details about the plot or script just yet. But that shouldn’t be a problem for Paramount. There are roughly 800 billion zombie stories to draw from. The zombie invasion of Hollywood will never end.