Before the film’s many production woes, Paramount envisioned “World War Z” as the start of a trilogy of films. Each of them would have centered on Pitt’s character, the former UN investigator Gerry Lane, battling not just the infected but also the dangerous global sociopolitical changes that emerge in the wake of the zombie pandemic. (Imagine a political action-thriller in the vein of the “Bourne” movies crossed with “The Walking Dead,” to paraphrase a 2012 report by the Los Angeles Times.) You can see, then, why the studio initially recruited “The Orphanage” and “The Impossible” director Juan Antonio Bayona to helm the sequel, wanting someone who could do equal justice by both the film’s human horror drama and all the zombie-related spectacle around it.
After Bayona departed the sequel in 2016 due to creative differences, Fincher entered talks to replace him. From the get-go, though, it was difficult to imagine a director known for making “feel-bad” adult dramas and crime-thrillers helming something as crowd-pleasing as a “World War Z” sequel. Fincher was clearly in no rush to make the film, either, and spent the next couple of years overseeing script revisions rather than charging head-first into production (not that anyone expected anything less from the notoriously perfectionist filmmaker). But by early 2019, Fincher had stepped away from the sequel to focus his attention on producing and directing Netflix’s “Mindhunter” series, at which point the “World War Z” sequel was reported to have been unofficially canceled.
Source From: www.slashfilm.com
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