Paramount is making a second “World War Z”, and Brad Pitt is returning to star in it. Edward Berger, who made “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Conclave”, will direct from a script by Dennis Kelly. Deadline broke the story on Friday 18 September, and Variety and The Hollywood Reporter followed the same night. The plot is being kept quiet, and so is everything about who else might be in it. The first film came out in 2013, which makes this a thirteen year gap between instalments.
We have covered the zombie apocalypse twenty nine times on this site, and every one of those was television. Twenty five of them are the Walking Dead universe, and that universe is now ending. That is the part nobody else wrote this week, and it is why this announcement lands harder here than a routine sequel greenlight would. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “The Walking Dead: Dead City” season three, for how “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon” is being brought to an end, and for the ending of the 2013 film.
We have covered the zombie apocalypse twenty nine times on this site, and every one of those was television.”
The hire came off another set entirely. Pitt and Berger have just finished “The Riders” for A24, an adaptation of Tim Winton’s novel written by David Kajganich and shot across Europe. Ridley Scott’s Scott Free produced it with Plan B, and the cast includes Julianne Nicholson, Danny Huston, Camille Cottin and Lara Pulver, with the film now in post-production and no release date on it. Pitt started pitching Berger on the zombie sequel early in that shoot, and by the end of production Berger had agreed to it. Paramount closed both deals over the last few weeks. Pitt produces alongside Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner for Plan B, and Berger takes an executive producer credit.
This is the sequel that would not happen. David Fincher was attached to it for years at Pitt’s urging, and that version got close enough to cameras that it had a budget to argue about. The budget kept growing until Paramount would not pay it, and Fincher walked away in 2019. The studio shelved the film after that, but Pitt never let go of it.
Skydance bought Paramount in 2025 and moved the sequel up the pile almost immediately. Paramount told CinemaCon in April that it was back in active development. At the time that was a statement of intent with nobody attached to it. Five months later there is a star, a director and a writer, and the writer is the one worth looking at hardest.
Now the part that is ours. Twenty five of those twenty nine articles are AMC shows. “Dead City” accounts for three seasons of it and “Daryl Dixon” accounts for four. Between them we have written the premieres, the finales, the casting, the delays and the endings. That lane is running out of road, and it is running out of it right now.
“Daryl Dixon” is finishing. AMC confirmed a fourth and final season, we covered the date on 9 September, and Jimmy Smits is the man waiting at the end of it. The show wrapped filming back in 2025 and still does not air until 2027, which is a long time to hold a finale. “Dead City” premiered its third season on 26 July and closed it on Sunday 13 September. AMC has not renewed it and has not cancelled it either. It is simply sitting there while the network decides.
So the television zombie is winding down at the exact moment the cinema zombie gets a tentpole, and they are not even the same animal. The AMC walker is slow, and the horror of it is that it never stops coming and never needs to. “World War Z” built its whole spectacle on the opposite idea. Its infected sprint, and they climb over one another until a wall of bodies goes over a wall of concrete. A reader who knows our beat is about to meet a very different monster.
There is no release date yet and no title beyond the obvious one. There is no plot either, which is normal this early and is worth saying plainly rather than filling in with a guess. What Paramount has actually bought here is a package. Pitt is the only returning element anybody has confirmed, Berger is the prestige name on the poster, and Kelly is the writer who has to solve the problem that two earlier scripts could not. Mireille Enos played Gerry’s wife Karin in the original, and nobody has said whether she is coming back. The 2013 film earned more than $540 million worldwide off a novel it barely resembled. The studio is betting the brand held up across thirteen years better than the story did.
Kelly is the most interesting name on the list by some distance. He won a Tony for writing the book of “Matilda the Musical”, which is not the credit you expect here. He also created “Utopia”, a British thriller about a manufactured pandemic and the people covering it up. That is very much the credit you expect here. Paramount has hired the writer whose best known genre work is about an engineered virus, to write a film about a virus. That is not an accident.
Berger is the bigger gamble of the two. He directed “All Quiet on the Western Front”, which won four Academy Awards, and he followed it with “Conclave”, a film whose tensest sequence is a vote count in a locked room. He has never made an action picture in his life. Paramount has handed a creature blockbuster to a director whose gift is people in rooms making decisions under pressure. That is the most interesting call in the whole announcement.
The risk is the one that nearly killed the first film and did kill the second. Max Brooks published an oral history in 2006, and it is dozens of separate voices describing a global war after it is already over, with no hero anywhere near the centre of it. Marc Forster’s film solved that by inventing Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) and sending him around the world, and it still could not land the ending. Damon Lindelof was brought in to rewrite the third act and ran out of time, so Drew Goddard finished the job. The production went back to Budapest for seven weeks of reshoots. A twelve minute battle in Russia was cut and replaced with a quiet laboratory sequence, and the budget climbed to a reported $190 million. A sequel has to invent all of that again, from nothing.
One last thing, and it is ours as well. The last time we mapped this universe was June, in a piece counting every Walking Dead project still standing. The answer then was that the television side was contracting. It has contracted further since, and the biggest zombie story on our board this weekend is a film with no script pages anybody has seen. Our zombie shelf has been an AMC shelf for its entire life. It is about to have a Paramount tentpole sitting on it.
What Do You Think? Is a director best known for a trench and a vote count the right hand for a zombie blockbuster, or is Paramount buying prestige it cannot use? Does hiring the writer of “Utopia” tell you what kind of outbreak film this is going to be? And with “Daryl Dixon” ending in 2027 and “Dead City” still unrenewed, is the screen zombie moving back to cinemas for good?
Catch up properly: every “Walking Dead” episode in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Walking Dead timeline.
See you on the next binge!
