Movies
Paramount Just Pulled the Plug On David Fincher’s ‘World War Z’ Sequel
Devastating news from The Playlist who is reporting that Paramount Pictures, just last night, pulled the plug on the long-gestating World War Z sequel that had been in development under the direction of David Fincher.
The site asserts that budget, as is usually the case, was definitely an issue, but only to a degree. Fincher and his team were proposing something less than the budget of the original. The site believes it’s not entirely coincidental that Paramount, that makes far fewer films than the average studio, just allotted a lot of money for two significant blockbusters—Mission Impossible 7 & 8 that will arrive in the summer of 2021 and 2022, and just landed official release dates.
World War Z 2 had been staffing up for a lengthy shoot this year in five different countries and a six-month shoot in Atlanta, but the film simply never received its green light, and none of these hires were officially made.
Added the site: star Brad Pitt is apparently not a happy camper with the studio right now. The site notes that World War Z is now six years old and given that Pitt held out for years, waiting for Fincher’s schedule to clear and Paramount to greenlight the movie, it’s not inconceivable to think the project is now dead for good, though who knows what Paramount will ultimately do.
Watch this spot.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
You must be logged in to post a comment.