Ten years. That’s how long it’s been since Ruben Fleischer‘s Zombieland was released in theaters. And now, we are finally getting a sequel after a decade of waiting.
But plans for the film that would eventually become Zombieland: Double Tap (our review) began almost immediately after the first film opened to $24.7 million back in 2009. Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick planned to have the sequel begin the day after the original film ended and see what the next day in Zombieland looked like for Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin).
Unfortunately, the duo got busy with other projects (those would be 2013’s Zombieland pilot for Amazon, the action sequel G.I. Joe: Retaliation and 2016’s Deadpool) and were unable to fully commit to a sequel. It soon seemed like Zombieland 2 would never happen. Alas, here we are in 2019 and Zombieland: Double Tap hits theaters this weekend.
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We had the chance to speak with Eisenberg and director Ruben Fleischer about the film and its development process. Though there are plenty of reasons as to why the film took so long to get made, not much is being said about the plethora of drafts that were written over the last 10 years (because there were quite a few). In the Q&A following the press screening of the film, Fleischer mentioned that there were aspects of the rejected drafts that, by the time they got serious about making the film, just wouldn’t work. After all, a lot has changed in the last 10 years!
Regarding one of the rejected drafts, Fleischer said:
“The theme of [one] script was that zombies had kind of gotten boring and killing zombies had kind of gotten boring. It was meta in that way. It was a commentary on the fact that there’s just too much zombies. We’ve reached peak zombie and so I think the characters ennui was a little bit reflective of [the audience’s] as well. [Zombies] weren’t any kind of real threat and so Tallahassee lost his passion because he just didn’t have the challenge anymore. In the original draft Tallahassee was really excited when he came across [the T-800s], what were then called “Super Zombies”, because it was his reason for living was kind of his spark was lit again.”
The desire to feature zombie fatigue in the film was no doubt in response to the things like AMC’s The Walking Dead (which hadn’t even premiered when the first film was released), its spinoff Fear the Walking Dead and, well, the original Zombieland. It’s no secret that the creatures have been a bit overplayed over the last decade, but while making fun of that fatigue might have made sense in 2013, it would feel old hat in 2019.
This isn’t to say that the rejected drafts were terrible. On the contrary, most of them contained elements that made their way into the sequel. There were even elements from the earlier drafts that Fleischer liked that didn’t make their way into the final product, but rather evolved into different things that wound up working out better than he could have anticipated.
For example, the doppelgängers for Tallahassee and Columbus (played by Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch, respectively) are featured prominently in the sequel’s marketing, but the Columbus doppelgänger wasn’t in the original script. Fleischer told us:
“I can say honestly that every draft I put forward to the cast I felt could have been an awesome version of the movie. There was a version at one point with the doppelgängers where it was originally just one of them: Alpha Tallahassee and…he was one-upping everything that Tallahassee was doing. We thought that was such a fun concept that we might as well duplicate it [by adding another doppelgänger] so things evolved I guess over the course of the scripts. And there was a really great action sequence that I remember from the very first draft. The opening was going to be that a golf ball rolls down a thing and knocks over something that swings but anyway…[it was] a Rube Goldberg machine that resulted in the Washington Monument falling on a zombie and then we find Tallahassee and Columbus.”
After approving each draft himself, Fleischer would send it over to his cast to get their thoughts on it. Eisenberg noted that the most important thing to him when reading any of them was that Reese and Wernick’s signature voice was present. That voice is one of the key ingredients that made the first film work so well. That voice is most definitely present in the script that wound up becoming Double Tap. Eisenberg agrees, saying:
“The voice was so clear and it was so great. It was the same writers and…it just treated the characters in a different way. It treated the characters as if they were real emotional people just in this crazy world. You wouldn’t expect that from a movie like this, walking to the monitors where the writers are watching the takes and Rhett Reese is crying because he wrote this scene based on something in his personal life. You wouldn’t watch a movie like this, which is like a big splashy comedy, and think it was derived from the pain that somebody wrote a drama with. So because it’s imbued with that and because it’s derived from that, it has a special quality that transcends the genre.”
