Not that Brad Pitt ever really needed the extra exposure, but World War Z was supposed to mark the beginning of a science fiction series that would have placed the perennial A-list actor at the hot-zone epicenter of his very own expanded zombie franchise.
In the original 2013 movie (currently airing on SYFY — view the schedule here!), Pitt starred as Gerry Lane, dragged out of retirement and back to his former role as a U.N. investigator, all to stake out the cure for a global zombie disease. The film ended with the game-changing tease that the cure renders zombies unable to detect humans who haven’t been infected yet, which in turn set up a possible second film in which society might have fought to reclaim a world already devastated by the zombie apocalypse.
David Fincher on the unmade World War Z sequel: “It was a little like The Last of Us”
Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace) directed World War Z, and a similarly big directing name — David Fincher — was intended to be seated at the helm for Pitt’s return in the planned (but never made) World War Z sequel. World War Z had been inspired by the same-named 2006 horror novel from author Max Brooks, and a 2012 Los Angeles Times feature flagged the first film as the opening salvo in what was meant to be a full-fledged zombie-themed movie trilogy that would feature Pitt in the ongoing leading role.
Fincher’s busy creative schedule, plus budget issues and a changing landscape of cultural standards at the international box office, all reportedly conspired to thwart the studio’s attempts at getting a film followup to World War Z past the pre-production stage. By 2019, reports surfaced that plans for the sequel had officially been shelved. But in a more recent 2023 interview with GQ — fresh on the heels of the first TV season of post-apocalyptic creature drama The Last of Us — Fincher opened up about the direction his sequel collaboration with Pitt might have taken.
“It was a little like The Last of Us,” Fincher confided. “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. In our title sequence, we were going to use the little parasite… they used it in their title sequence, and in that wonderful opening with the Dick Cavett, David Frost-style talk show.”
The Last of Us introduced its zombie-adjacent apocalypse of fungus-infected “clickers” by showing, right from the start, the domino effect of societal panic that followed from the first reported cases of the disease’s quickly-spreading pandemic among humans. Fincher’s praise for the series’ handling of similarly-themed material came with an additional revelation that his World Ward Z sequel likely would not have followed Brooks’ book-based source material any more closely than the first film — but, he intriguingly added, “there is some talk of doing that.”
With no recent reports from the World War Z front, it’s tough to know whether a sequel will ever materialize — or, for that matter, if the franchise might someday be rebooted under new creative direction and a new cast. That means the franchise remains quarantined to only a single movie for now… but at least it’s a good one.
Catch Pitt saving the planet from zombies in the original World War Z, airing this month on SYFY. Scope the full TV schedule here!
