Revisiting the book today, Brooks’ deconstruction of human fallibility and governmental incompetence rings all the more true in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic we all endured–most of the author’s conjecture on how the zombie plague could realistically spread and be aided by bad actors and willful neglect for public safety now feels especially prescient, and you can imagine someone writing a piece just like World War Z about the COVID years. The book lacks a traditional narrative–instead it’s a collection of fictional interviews with people around the world, each detailing aspects of how they survived or contributed during the zombie crisis a decade earlier. Striking a much more mature tone than his earlier, comedy-inflected Zombie Survival Guide, Brooks’ book offered a sobering, extraordinarily wide-ranging overview of what human life might look like as it claws its way back from the brink of a great calamity, one that just so happened to be a devastating plague of the living dead. Ten years removed, it’s a fitting time to look back and gauge where things went wrong in this adaptation, and why even with its “success,” we never saw a long-rumored sequel.Īuthor Max Brooks published his influential faux history/epistolary novel World War Z in 2006, in the wake of films such as Shaun of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead (2004) and Land of the Dead (and The Walking Dead comic) reviving some measure of public interest in zombie fiction, which wasn’t exactly in a great place in the 1990s and early 2000s. All that, despite the fact that World War Z is also one of the most shameless, egregious abuses of pristine source material in recent Hollywood history. By most any metric, that would make it the most successful zombie film of all time. We’re talking about a project that was by far the most expensive piece of zombie fiction ever conceived, and also the highest grossing, raking in more than $540 million worldwide. It was the biggest, grandest encapsulation of the zombie genre that had ever been attempted, and indeed it remains so to this day–even in comparison with something like HBO’s The Last of Us, the $190 million budget of World War Z was somehow almost twice as much as the cost of that show’s entire first season. When Brad Pitt’s World War Z bulled its way into theaters a decade ago this June, it carried with it the status of a true anomaly.
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