WORLD WAR Z Sequel Moving Forward With Director Juan Antonio Bayona

World War Z was an earner for Paramount, even if the movie was uneven and spoon-fed some of the worst CGI of 2013, however the movie did end up making $540 million worldwide. The original production met a ton of reshoots and included in-production rewrites of the script from Damon Lindelof, there had been some rumblings the studio was unhappy with director Marc Forster. THR reports they’ve hired a new director to handle the untitled sequel, that would be The Impossible director Juan Antonio Bayona. He’s also known for the excellent Spanish horror film The Orphanage which was produced by Guillermo del Toro. They add that while a writer isn’t attached Bayona will oversee the writing process.

It sounds like they might be resurrecting the original ending which saw “his wife in the hands of a cold-hearted army officer and Pitt storming the shores of America, cutting through a zombie horde as his reunification journey really begins.” Nothing is for sure at this point as they did find a cure at the end of the film, perhaps the virus mutates and a whole new batch of zombies are developed. I did like some of the action sequences of the film mainly the parts where Pitt’s character is globetrotting and figuring out the origin, I’m not seeing how they could make a sequel though without using that original ending. I wouldn’t mind seeing Max Brooks (also a screenwriter and who wrote the original novel) get involved in the script, since obviously the problems in the original stem from deviating from the book in the first place.

SOURCE: THR