Paramount wants to make director J.A. Bayona happy by rewriting the draft and hiring 'Utopia' scribe Dennis Kelly.
- Oct 31, 2015
AceShowbiz - Although there was a setback, "World War Z 2" is officially back on track. Paramount has hired a new writer to pick up from an earlier draft penned by "Burnt" scribe Steven Knight.
The first "World War Z" director Marc Foster had announced in October 2013 that he won't return for the sequel. A hunt for new director landed on Spanish helmer J.A. Bayona whose credit include "The Impossible" and TV series "Penny Dreadful". Words are, he was also offered to direct Universal's "Jurassic World 2" and that scared Paramount.
According to THR, the studio wanted to keep Bayona in deal by hiring Dennis Kelly to rewrite the script. Fanboy-friendly, Kelly has worked on the popular U.K.'s Channel 4 series "Utopia". After the change, Bayona is now "squarely on board to direct". Skydance Productions is co-producing and co-financing the film which is scheduled to open in theaters June 9, 2017.
Brad Pitt, who is producing the pic, is up to reprise his role. "We're certainly talking about it, yes," he said at 2013 Toronto Film Festival. "We have so many ideas on the table from the time we spent developing this thing and figuring out how the zombie worlds work." The first film picked up materials from Max Brooks' novel of the same name. Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard and Damon Lindelof wrote the script with J. Michael Straczynski receiving story by credit.
"We have so many ideas and so much information - we think we have a lot of stuff to mine from," Pitt continued. "We gotta get the script right first to determine if we go further. We'll wait and see how the script turns out but yes, I'd love to come back."
