Going into the summer season, if you’d asked many pundits what they thought would be the biggest box office failure, a lot of people would have gone for World War Z ahead of actual disasters such as Lone Ranger. That was due to massive budget overruns and a disastrous shoot, which went so badly that the entire third act needed to be reshot.
In the end it was a pretty big hit, taking $530 million worldwide, but apparently that doesn’t mean director Marc Forster is gonna be back for the planned sequel, as THR reports he’s out. That’s perhaps not surprising considering reports that Forster was overwhelmed by the scale of the production and many of the film’s issues were down to him focussing so much on the art that the business side became chaos. There have also been suggestions that he and Brad Pitt ended up being barely able to communicate.
As for the sequel, which Pitt also produced, he says “We are talking about it. We are going to investigate a script. We have a lot of ideas we will cull from. Nobody is writing just yet, but we are compiling our ideas.
It’s just that they’re compiling them with Forster.