Ever since the six-month push back for the Brad Pitt-produced World War Z, there have been questions about the film’s overall quality and what might have gone wrong. It was not until now that we have had something beyond typical industry scapegoating as today brings a fresh answer compliments of The Hollywood Reporter which is running a piece on the debacle in their June 22nd issue.
It seems that one of the biggest problems might be how the project was set up in the first place. Apparently, the book-spawned effort had enlisted director Marc Forster whose credits include Quantum of Solace and Machine Gun Preacher. The man was known not to be that solid of a bet in the blockbuster genre, but Brad Pitt hired him anyways with the idea that the studio could surround him with a talented crew capable of picking up the slack in specific categories.
In effect, this is generating some preemptive finger pointing from the studio as several people are saying the film simply lacked the leadership needed to pull off such an effort. The argument seems legitimate; however, this does not account for the fact that the studio is basically redoing the entire ending as they enlisted Prometheus writer David Lindelof to rewrite it just last week.
Another issue with the film’s production was the fact that this is not exactly a straight book-to-film conversion. Max Brooks’ novel is set up more like another Brad Pitt movie, Babel. The theatrical version actually takes a straight narrative with its star at the center thus the creative issues.
All-in-all, the movie looks to be quite salvageable though as it is supposedly just the ending that needed reworked. We will find out if that is true or not once the film releases into theaters nationwide on June 21, 2013.