George A. Romero’s Dead movies are quite interesting legally, as no one owns the first one (due to a copyright snafu that resulted in it entering the public domain), while the second, third and subsequent movies are owned by different people and treated as completely separate entities rather than a series.
As a result, anyone can remake Night Of The Living Dead (and quite a few have), and we’ve already had separate do-overs of Dawn Of The Dead and Day Of The Dead. It was only 2008 when we got the remake of the last of those, but the rights holders obviously want to squeeze a bit more cash from their property, as The LA Times reports that another new take is already in the works.
Lati Grobman and Christa Campbell, who produced Texas Chainsaw 3D, now hold those rights, with Campbell commenting, “We want to keep it as close to the Romero version as possible, to make sure that his fans are happy. These are not going to be zombies climbing walls and doing back flips like in World War Z.”
The plan is to make it for $10-$20 million and release the film in 2014.
The original movies sees a group of soldiers and scientists hiding in a bunker from the undead plague. They then do experiments a captive zombie in the hope of understanding what’s going on.