Thanks to its beginnings as a bestselling book, World War Z seemed destined for box
office glory someday, but that road to the big screen wasn't always an easy one.
We're taking a look back at the ending of World War Z and how it went from prized source
material to hailed script to problem production to box office hit.
After the success of his 2003 how-to manual The Zombie Survival Guide, author Max Brooks
decided to take his love of the walking dead up a notch.
His next book was a harrowing oral history-style novel set in the era after the outbreak of
a virus that reanimates corpses and nearly wipes out the human race.
In it, a member of the UN Postwar Commission travels to locations around the world, conducting
interviews that take the reader from the first hot spots to the collapse of society to the
darkest moments, when humanity finds a way to fight back.
Audiences responded with great enthusiasm, and World War Z would top the New York Times
bestseller list, eventually selling more than a million copies.
With that level of success, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood came calling,
and Brad Pitt's company Plan B eventually landed the rights.
Pitt brought on J. Michael Straczysnki, a veteran genre writer behind cult classics
like Babylon 5, to craft the first draft of the script.
Straczysnki's version kept the interview format of the book intact, and his draft was strong
enough to attract direct Marc Forster to the project.
It was here that the first signs of trouble in the making of the film began to emerge.
"I want my blanket!"
Fresh off his James Bond film Quantum of Solace, Forster's ideas for World War Z clashed with
Straczynski's, and the director asked for rewrites.
State of Play writer Matthew Michael Carnahan was brought in to develop a new, more action-heavy
script, and major changes were made.
Instead of focusing on the aftermath of the war with the zombies, the new script placed
Pitt's character, Gerry Lane, in the middle of the outbreak from the beginning.
Carnahan's script was solid enough that shooting could begin, but studio executives still weren't
sure about the film's ending.
In Carnahan's version of the story, Pitt's Gerry Lane would endure everything from a
crash landing in Russia to a time jump to an invasion of the west coast of the United
States, all without ever reuniting with his family.
Eventually, it was decided that rewrites and reshoots were needed to get the film in shape.
Lost writer Damon Lindelof, and later The Martian writer Drew Goddard, were brought
in to offer tweaks to Carnahan's script.
What they eventually delivered was an all-out, expensive redesign of the film's third act,
which Paramount agreed to fund.
The film's budget ballooned to at least $190 million, and by the end of the shoot Forster
and Pitt were reportedly not on speaking terms anymore.
So after all this back-and-forth, where did we end up?
Instead of crash-landing in Russia, Lane's zombie-infested flight out of Israel heads
for a World Health Organization facility in Wales.
As it's coming in for a landing, however, the zombies threaten to overrun everything.
Lane, in either a really brilliant or really dumb move, detonates a grenade that tears
a hole in the fuselage and depressurizes the cabin, leading to all the zombies being sucked
out and the plane coming in for an intense crash-landing.
After a blackout, Lane, impaled by a rather large piece of shrapnel, wakes up in the wreckage
and tries to make his way to the W.H.O. outpost that was his initial destination.
Overcome by his injuries, he loses consciousness, and later awakes under the care of a W.H.O.
doctor played by future Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi.
After regaining his senses, he comes to a shocking conclusion: Having seen the zombie
horde pass by the sick and elderly, he believes that the virus drives its host to seek out
only healthy and viable victims to facilitate its spread.
Could this be the key to humanity's survival?
Wouldn't you know it, a W.H.O. facility is just the place for Lane to test his theory
that, by infecting one's self with a deadly but curable pathogen, it's possible to create
a sort of "camouflage" that will cause zombies to ignore a potential victim.
The only problem is that the lab containing the types of pathogens he needs is in the
zombie-infested part of the building.
In order to figure this all out and possibly save humanity, Lane and his companions have
to embark on a sort of stealth mission, sneaking their way on to a particular vault without
alerting the dormant undead wandering the halls.
Here, we see the results of Lindelof and Goddard's effort to scale the action down to a more
personal level.
Rather than an epic battle, we're treated to a tense game of cat and mouse as Lane and
company tiptoe their way toward the relevant vault.
While they're eventually separated, Lane does get where he needs to go.
Once he's there, however, he's trapped by a zombie blocking the exit... which is the
perfect impetus for him to conduct the kind of experiment that only works in the movies.
Injecting himself with an unknown pathogen, he then opens the door, only to find himself
ignored by every zombie he encounters on his walk back to freedom.
"He just walked right past him!"
That climax having happened, we then move into a conclusion that dovetails somewhat
back toward the larger geopolitical scope of the book.
With Lane's theory proven correct, we see the distribution of an injectable "vaccine"
brewed from a strain of meningitis to people around the world, as humankind begins to fight
back.
We see scenes of various battles, including some of the footage of the Moscow fight from
the original cut's ending.
Zombies are burned, evacuations are conducted, and a note of hope on a global scale is sounded.
"If you can fight, fight."
True to the rework's purpose, however, the main focus remains personal, as Lane and his
family are happily reunited in a safe haven in Nova Scotia.
Pitt's voiceover speaks of a war just begun, but for his character, it seems the journey
has ended in the best possible place, back together with his wife and daughters and out
of harm's way.
It took a while for World War Z to finally make the leap from page to screen, and the
film version endured more than its share of battle to get there.
After all that, would audiences respond to the film?
Yes, they would: World War Z exploded to a box office take of $202.4 million domestically
and $540 million worldwide, which were pretty great numbers for a film with such a troubled
production history.
It also earned the biggest opening weekend of Pitt's career, devouring $66.4 million
in its first three days.
Despite its troubles, World War Z's success showed that audiences were still hungry for
more zombie stories, even in a world already saturated by the likes of Zombieland and The
Walking Dead.
Meanwhile, everyone involved emerged unscathed.
Pitt's still a huge star, and went on to hit a career with 2019's Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood.
Straczynski moved on to write the cult hit TV series Sense8, Forster directed Christopher
Robin for Disney, and Damon Lindelof eventually created one of 2019's best new series, Watchmen.
Not bad for the crew behind a movie that, as it staggered to its ending, seemed like
it would probably be dead on arrival.
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