What Could Paramount's World War Z 2 Be About?
Zombies; one of the most terrifying yet prominent subjects of the horror genre in the recent decade. From games like Valve’s Left 4 Dead to TV shows like AMC’s The Walking Dead, the zombie hoards have captivated audiences with their grotesque appearances and the determination to overwhelm the living.
One of the many installments of zombie culture is Paramount Pictures’ and Plan B Entertainment’s World War Z (2013), following Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) as he searches for a cure to the zombie pandemic that erupts and takes over the world. Grossing over half a billion dollars in revenue and becoming the highest-grossing zombie movie of all time, World War Z is considered an incredible success and spurred Paramount to announce a sequel just weeks after the release datewith the intention of making a World War Z trilogy.
At the end of February 2018 though, it was announced that Pitt would be pushing back the production of World War Z 2 yet again in order to work on a Quentin Tarantino film titled Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
In the near five years since the original was released, the sequel had gained Juan Antonio Bayona as a director, then subsequently lost him due to other commitments, and now has David Fincher stepping up to direct. As of right now, the only progress made aside from the cast is the script, which Fincher claimed was being reworked “against the mythology that exists to see where [it] can go”.
This brings up a few questions, beginning with how the series can facilitate a sequel (or a third installment, for that matter). At the ending of the first movie (spoiler alert), it seems as if a way to defend against the zombies has been reached and the world is able to recover, despite Lane’s ominous prediction of “our war [having] just begun”. While the writers would not have known about a sequel at the time of writing, the concept of war opens up a few ideas for a new story. First is the possibility of a weaponization of the virus; with a way to camouflage oneself from zombies, it would be possible to harvest and study the unknown viral strain. Then the virus could be engineered to ignore the ‘vaccine’ from the first movie, leaving humanity defenseless. Alternatively, a malicious group could turn the curing of illness into a weapon. The vaccine from the first movie is really just a controlled terminal illness that causes zombies to ignore you while you escape, after which you can be given a cure to the illness that is the vaccine. A premature cure to the vaccine could leave an individual susceptible to zombies though, inciting a war among the living with zombies as the weapons.
Another question brought up by Fincher’s statement is if the production team is going to follow any of Max Brooks’ ‘mythology’. Though the movie is based off of Brooks’ book of the same name, the two works take place in entirely different time periods. While Paramount’s World War Z captures the beginning of the outbreak, Brooks’ World War Z is based around a reporter gathering stories from various individuals about a zombie war that had transpired years prior. The only way in which Paramount could work with Brooks’ mythology were to be if the movie act as prequels to the book, showcasing the zombie war as it transpires. Then again, the movie follows quite an opposite approach to zombism compared to the book. The agile zombie that ignores sick/old/handicapped humans and can ‘turn’ someone within eleven seconds of a bite is completely contrary to Brooks’ slow, vicious, slowly-transmitted zombie. Furthermore, the zombie of Brooks’ World War Z was a slow yet ravenous machine with strength in numbers that could pose a threat to an army. Paramount’s zombie has the weakness of ignoring the sick, dismantling the idea of a zombie war from happening considering the vaccine from the first movie.
A possibility, though somewhat lackluster for a Hollywood movie, is exploring the relationship between the zombie virus and the bacterial infections that are used as vaccines in the first movie. While diseases normally don’t interact with one another, the idea of zombism acting as a physical condition, like albinism or osteogenesis imperfecta (look it up), while the normal infections are still able to be contracted by zombies could produce a film. Either the zombies could act as a cloud of disease, straining health supplies and raising tensions, or the infection could render the human vaccine ineffective. World War Z introduced zombies that seek those in good health, but if it was revealed that it the caveat was simply having better health than the zombies, those living with the vaccine would be seen as targets again.
Who am I to speculate though, I’m not a Hollywood writer. With a release date that looks like it will be set around mid to late 2019, World War Z 2 is bound to generate an appetite for the rotting, shambling horrors we so crave. Let’s all hope that the other zombie films between now and then will be enough to keep us at bay.
