“They won’t stay dead!” declares the poster for George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, the 1968 zombie movie that spawned a franchise — and a genre. While the dead would walk the Earth in such films as Dawn of the Dead (both Romero’s 1978 original and Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake) and Return of the Living Dead, and video game adaptations like Resident Evil and House of the Dead, zombie movies died off. But then there was 28 Days Later, and Shaun of the Dead, and Zombieland, and The Walking Dead was at one point the biggest show on television.
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Paramount Pictures capitalized on the reanimated zombie craze with 2013’s World War Z, Marc Forster’s adaptation of the 2006 Max Brooks book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. An account of the worldwide Zombie War that has plagued humanity for a decade, the book was adapted into an action-thriller that followed newly-retired United Nations investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) as an unidentified virus strain rapidly started to spread across the globe.
World War Z grossed $540 million at the global box office in the summer of 2013, with the zombie blockbuster becoming the biggest zombie flick of all time and one of the highest-grossing horror movies ever. But with a reported total price tag of $430 million — including the P&A costs and Pitt’s rich deal — the costly WWZ barely broke even, and a sequel that was set for June 2017 never materialized.
But with this summer’s F1 speeding past the worldwide total of World War Z to become Pitt’s highest-grossing movie ever with $575 million, newly-merged Paramount Skydance is looking to bring the IP back from the dead. (Skydance Productions co-produced 2013’s World War Z with Paramount and Pitt’s Plan B.)
David Ellison, the chairman and CEO of Paramount Skydance Corporation who served as an executive producer on World War Z, told press during a media event Wednesday that a WWZ II is on the table. Ellison named the Star Trek franchise and Tom Cruise’s Top Gun as “a priority” for the new Paramount, which also has new Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies in the works, including an announced crossover with G.I. Joe and the live-action The Last Ronin.
Ellison — also a producer on the Paramount-based Mission: Impossible, Terminator, and Jack Ryan franchises — now heads the studio that is renewing its interest in both horror and R-rated comedies. (Paramount’s highest-grossing R-rated comedy remains 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop at $316 million.) The studio has already slated A Quiet Place Part III for July 9, 2027, and Smile 3 is expected to begin filming this year, with slasher Scream 7 set for February 27, 2026.
J.A. Bayona (The Impossible, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) was attached to direct the World War Z sequel that was announced in 2015 with Steven Knight (Girl in the Spider’s Web, Bond 26) penning the script. That version ultimately never moved forward. In 2019, David Fincher — a frequent collaborator of Pitt’s who directed the actor in Se7en, Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and the upcoming The Adventures of Cliff Booth — was set to reunite with Pitt on World War Z 2, only for Paramount to pull the plug on the smaller-budgeted sequel.
“It was a little like The Last of Us,” Fincher previously told GQ UK of the sequel, referring to the hit Sony PlayStation video game turned into a hit HBO television series. “I’m glad that we didn’t do what we were doing, because The Last of Us has a lot more real estate to explore the same stuff.”
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