What Could Have Been: World War Z 2

World War Z was originally envisioned as the start of a trilogy. And while the finished film leaves the door open for additional installments, ending with Brad Pitt's voiceover warning that the war has just begun, those follow-up films never materialized. However, a sequel was planned, with frequent Brad Pitt collaborator David Fincher, director of Fight Club and Se7en, set to direct. Not only that, but the first film originally had an entirely different ending, featuring a massive zombie battle in Moscow. So let's dive in and find out what happened behind the scenes that led to the changes in the first, first film, as well as a cancellation of the second, and also take a look at what could have been: World War Z 2 and even 3.

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After Brad Pitt acquired the rights to adapt Max Brooks's novel, Pitt's production company planned the entertainment. They hired Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski to turn Brooks's novel into a script. However, this was no easy feat, since the novel is structured as a series of personal accounts told to and recorded by an agent of the United Nations postwar commission, detailing the experiences of survivors from around the world during a devastating zombie plague. Straczynski's version of World War Z would have stayed closer to the format of the novel and would have been more of a conspiracy thriller, like All the President's Men. In this version, Jerry's tasked with investigating how the zombie outbreak happened now that the immediate threat has been largely neutralized. However, as he travels the world interviewing low-level bureaucrats who know little and high-ranking officials who dodge questions, he begins to realize that the investigation is a sham, a PR stunt designed to make it seem like the government is interested in uncovering the truth, when in reality there's no genuine effort to get to the bottom of what went wrong. Eventually, Jerry uncovers a shocking conspiracy: most governments were well aware of the severity of the zombie threat but chose to do nothing because it was politically inconvenient, refusing to act until it was too late. As Jerry digs deeper, the powers that be pressure him to back off, threatening to relocate his family into an unprotected zone. Despite the danger, Jerry presses on, determined to expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable. Eventually, he uncovers that the government's plan, which saved the human race, involved relocating selected individuals based on age, IQ, political affiliation, and other factors to green zones, naturally fortified by mountains or rivers, while leaving the rest of the population as bait to draw zombies into urban centers, making the zombies easier for the military to eradicate. Straczynski's script would have been a unique take on the zombie genre, serving as a powerful metaphor for government inaction in the face of impending disasters, highlighting how leaders often ignore expert warnings until it's too late, only to cover up their failures afterward.

However, when Marc Forster was brought in to direct, he was eager to redeem himself after the mixed reception of Quantum of Solace and wanted to transform Straczynski's script into a large-scale action spectacle. So he dismissed Straczynski and hired Matthew Michael Carnahan to rewrite it—a somewhat odd choice considering Carnahan's previous film, State of Play, was an investigative procedural. Reflecting on the shift to a more action-oriented approach, Straczynski later remarked, "If all you wanted was an empty-headed Rambo versus the Zombies action film, why option this really elegant, smart book?" After the script was rewritten, the original third act was completely different from what appeared in the final film, with the story going in a different direction after Jerry boards the plane to escape Jerusalem. Instead of a stowaway zombie causing chaos mid-flight and leading to the plane crashing, the original version has the plane touching down safely in Moscow, where the military rounds up the passengers, forcibly drafting them into the army. From here, the story jumps forward in time, showing Jerry as the leader of a Russian zombie militia, training new recruits to fight and survive while living in underground tunnels. In one scene, Jerry and his team observe zombies huddled around a fire for warmth—as the warmer ones are sent out to attack, the colder ones stay behind to heat up, mirroring how penguins rotate between the colder outer edges and the warmer center of their huddle, demonstrating how zombies, like animals, work together. Eventually, Jerry convinces the Russian commanders to use the Russian winter to their advantage. The film ends with a climactic battle with the undead laying siege to Moscow's Red Square, as the Russians and their army of enslaved militia turn the tide against the zombies thanks to Jerry's tactics. Afterward, Jerry, who has been out of communication with his family this entire time, is finally able to get his wife on the phone, who reveals that she's in a refugee camp in the Everglades, which operates on a barter system, and the only thing she has to trade is herself, as we see that she's in a reluctant relationship with the soldier played by Matthew Fox who helped rescue her and her family from the rooftop at the beginning of the movie. Jerry, determined to rescue his wife and family, leads his ragtag crew across Russia and then on to boats to the United States, as the film ends with them storming the Florida beaches against hordes of zombies.

So why was the ending changed? After screening a rough cut of the film, while everyone thought the first two-thirds of the movie were solid, the final act was, according to Pitt, atrocious. Reports have also stated that it was rushed, incoherent, and poorly shot. As a result, screenwriter Damon Lindelof was brought in to help find a solution, and he proposed two options: Option A was to rewrite and reshoot certain scenes to improve the film, while Option B was far more drastic—cut everything after Jerry leaves Jerusalem and completely rewrite the third act. In a surprising move, Paramount chose Option B, opting to spend more money to overhaul the ending rather than patching up something that wasn't working and just releasing it to the public to make an easy buck. Their goal was to deliver the best possible version of the movie, even if it meant a bigger investment. And while the studio felt the original ending wasn't emotionally satisfying, it did set up the sequel—something the final version of the film didn't really prioritize, as it not only sees Jerry return to his family but provides a way to defeat the zombies with the creation of a vaccine which serves as camouflage against the undead. Regardless, the film did well enough financially that plans moved ahead for a sequel.

To get around the fact that a vaccine was created, in the sequel it would have been revealed that the vaccine only works for 36 hours before you have to take it again. Surviving humans use it as a temporary defense, allowing them to live in safe zones while the world's armies still struggle to reclaim the planet from the zombie hordes. However, there's hope in an airborne virus called E29 that, in theory, will make the zombies attack each other. The scientists who help develop it, though—Dr. Morel—mysteriously disappeared before being able to share the final piece of the pathogen with the rest of the world, stopping them from being able to mass-produce it and use it right before a planned global offensive against the zombies. To complicate things further, tensions are rising amongst the remaining countries, threatening to fracture their coalition. Jerry, now living with his family in Halifax, is sent to Geneva to track down Dr. Morel, who is last seen hiding out with survivors in the underground tunnels of the former Large Hadron Collider, as Europe has been overrun by zombies. After arriving, Jerry learns that Dr. Morel has already fled to Singapore, and the zombies she had been experimenting on have broken loose after injecting themselves with the camouflage. Jerry and his team quickly realize it doesn't work on these Z's. Forced to fight their way out, they managed to escape and board a plane heading to Singapore in pursuit of the elusive doctor. Once Jerry tracks her down, Dr. Morel reveals that while E29 works, it stops the camouflage from working, too. She's been trying to fix it and is in Singapore looking for a Nobel-winning scientist for help, but he's fled to a flotilla of massive vessels strapped together, floating in the ocean. To reach him, they need to get to a UN base on an island by boat, which means going through downtown Singapore. However, because these Z's haven't been infected by Morel's faulty biological weapon, camouflage will still work on them, but since everyone in the group is near the end of their previous camouflage cycle, they can't re-inject themselves yet and have to make it to the boat before it wears off. Of course, the camouflage wears off, forcing them to then fight their way to the harbor, which they eventually reach and escape on a boat to the UN base on an island and then fly to the flotilla of boats in the ocean where they find the scientist, who is unable to fix the E29 pathogen, as they learn that the disease is now airborne after it mutated following Morel's failed attempts at trying to make the E29 pathogen airborne. As tensions rise between the nations of the world, the flotilla is attacked by the Chinese, as Jerry decides to flee to a radio building in Bangladesh to broadcast the final piece of the E29 pathogen so that it could be mass-produced around the world, regardless of the fact that it renders the camouflage useless, deciding that it's better to fight than to hide.

So what went wrong? While Brad Pitt succeeded in bringing frequent collaborator David Fincher on board to direct, the project was ultimately canceled for several reasons. First, Fincher's schedules never seemed to line up, as both were busy shooting other movies, delaying the start of production. Second, the movie's massive budget was difficult to justify, especially considering that films of that scale usually are expected to yield a much larger return than what the first film pulled in. And finally, China, the most crucial market outside the US, has a ban on zombie films, significantly reducing the potential box office and likely contributing to the first film's underperformance internationally, as it was never released in China. David Fincher later admitted he was relieved the film was never made, noting it would have ended up feeling somewhat similar to The Last of Us, which, as a TV series, has the advantage of having more real estate to explore the same stuff. Even Fincher's planned title sequence for the film—a signature element of many of his works—would have been reminiscent of the one used in the show. Reflecting on the original trilogy plans and director Marc Forster's decision to rewrite Straczynski's original script that stayed true to the book, Carnahan would say that Straczynski's script about a guy traveling the world investigating what went wrong should have been saved for the third film, as he believed that you couldn't call the first movie World War Z without actually showing the actual world war against the disease.

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