Quantum of Solace director Marc Forster surprised everyone when he turned down another Bond flick to direct the adaptation of Max Brooks' best-selling novel World War Z. A script from J. Michael Staczynski was already in place and had been hailed as "a horror epic, a serious, sober-minded adult picture waiting to be made" and "a genre-defining piece of work" by an AICN script review. Straczynski himself described it as a "thriller" along the lines of Bourne Identity. You know, but with zombies.
Forster disagreed, however, claiming the script was "far from realization" and decided to make the thriller Disconnect before starting work on World War Z. Screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan (The Kingdom) was brought in to work on another draft in the meantime.
All of this was confusing to Brooks, who recently told MTV that he doesn't understand why Carnahan was brought in to work on a script he already thought was "brilliant."
You know... the studio comes in and gives their notes and Forster came in and gave his notes. Carnahan was brought in for reasons unbeknownst to me. Maybe he's doing a polish, maybe he's doing a top-down rewrite. I know that his draft is supposed to come in in the next few weeks.
I read Straczynski's first draft, and it was f**king brilliant. As the book writer I know that's sacrilege to say, but it really was good. I turned to my wife and said, "Honey, this is as good as the book. This is gonna be an amazing movie."
When Forster originally joined WWZ, the movie was tentatively scheduled to be released in 2010. With Forster now working on Disconnect, WWZ is more likely to arrive in 2012, but with a script revision arriving "in the next few weeks" and a box office landscape currently being ruled by the zombie comedy Zombieland, World War Z may enter theaters sooner rather than later.