Corona | Coming Attractions

According to Bloody Disgusting's sources at Comic-Con, Marc Forster has exited this project and Paramount is now actively courting a replacement for the director's chair.

It appears that the World War Z script is getting a rewrite. Fangoria Radio (reported via Bloody Disgusting) had author Max Brooks on and during the interview he revealed that screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan has come aboard to rewrite the WWZ screenplay. "He's one of Hollywood's hot A-list writers, so if they went after him and paid him a mountain of gold, it definitely shows their confidence in this project," Brooks is quoted as saying.

The brother of director Joe Carnahan, the writer wrote the screenplays for The Kingdom, Lions For Lambs and State of Play.

In an interview with Swiss online publication Migros-Magazin (and brought to our attention by Dark Horizons), director Marc Forster states that the World War Z production has hit a delay. The helmer states that the script still needs more development and that will likely mean that he will make another film called Disconnect before shooting the zombie apocalypse.

"Most zombie movies to this point have been small, focusing on a few people in a house. And this has got real scare. You're in India with hundreds of boats trying to get out of there with a tidal wave of zombies. The scale of what we're doing here is phenomenal."

That's what screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski explained to MTV Movies Blog about his part in the marking of the World War Z movie. Comparing his script's tone to that of The Bourne Identity, the Babylon 5 creator explained how he approached adapting Max Brooks' epic novel into a film story. "The fictional concept of the book is that its written by someone with the UN, so let's tell that story," he said. "Let's show the book being written. We follow this guy all over the world as he goes on these interviews, and he has his own personal story as well. You're cutting between the past and the present, how he got to this point."

Straczynski finished his first draft in the spring and now that Quantum of Solace director Marc Forster is on-board, he's working with the helmer on a final pass through. The ambitious hope is that the production can move ahead to schedule the first day of filming shortly after the start of 2009.

"Some of it is crazy in scale," Straczynski states. "It's huge. It's as political as the book was. And it ends with that book being completed."

Just as his new film is opening in North American theaters today, Variety reports that Quantum of Solace director Marc Forster has been hired to helm the World War Z movie for Paramount Pictures. "The genre always fascinated me, and when they pitched it to me, it reminded me of the paranoid conspiracy films of the '70s like All the President's Men," Forster told V.

All of the other incidentals for the project, like Straczynski's script and Plan B Entertainment as the film's producers, haven't changed. No ETA for a start to filming was given.