Amph Zombie Box Office

There's a great new trailer out for World War Z.


Originally budgeted for $125 million, the production costs have apparently hit $200 million, meaning that it will need something approaching $600 million worldwide to be considered a hit. Brad Pitt, one of the biggest media celebrities of modern times, is paradoxically not a fantastic box office draw. Fans of the book will note that the movie has virtually nothing in common with the book other than the title.

The fantastic Dawn of the Dead remake made $102 million worldwide on a $26 million budget.
Zombieland made $102 million worldwide on a $23 million budget.
28 Days Later made $82 million worldwide on a $8 million budget.
Warm Bodies made $99 million worldwide on a $35 million budget

Of course, this movie looks like it owes a lot to the Will Smith I Am Legend remake, which made $585 million on a $150 million budget.

It also looks like an attempt to appeal to the massive global audience for the apocalypse movies of Roland Emmerich. Compare this to 2012, which did $770 million worldwide on a $200 million budget.

This is either a Brad Pitt career killer, or a box office monster. If it performs like the best zombie movies ever, it is a monster flop. If it performs like I Am Legend, it is a break even prospect. If it performs like 2012, Pitt finally becomes the box office king he has really never been.

 

It just looks bad to me.

 

It's opening June 21, 2013, the weekend after Man of Steel and the weekend before the next Roland Emmerich movie: White House Down.

White House Down:

Lol. I guess Olympus Has Fallen has sucked all the wind out of that one. Two Die Hard in the White House movies in the same calendar year? It's like a dream come true.

 

I though zombie movies had to be low budget B films as an ISO requirement?

 

That's what I thought too. But Emmerich style Apocalypse Porn is cleared for $200 million budgets.

 

Ugh. And there are still no close-ups of the zombies, which makes me very, veryworried. I mean, the trailer already looks bad, but that lack of exposure is a horrible sign.

Wishing this would surprise us all and be a fantastic hit and maybe they're just bad at putting together trailers, but I know how unlikely that is. Will consider seeing it anyway to find out, but not getting my hopes up.

It looks like the audio play might remain the only way to get WWZ in acted form.

 

It is. The film is a complete departure. They took the name, zombies, a setting or two...and ditched the rest, it looks like.

 

I think it will do well even though it looks like crap.

 

This movie looks terrible. Because I work in a theater I hope it does well but man does it look crappy.

 

I loved the book, I have zero faith in the movie. They should have just called it something else if they were going to butcher it

 

I don't think you can even argue that they "butchered" the book. All they did was appropriate the title.

 

I'm really nervous about the movies of this summer. I think The Lone Ranger is going to flop hardcore as well since they went over budget on that one and Johnny Depp might be overexposed at this point.

I will see World War Z even though it looks nothing like the fantastic book.

 

Yeah. I'd be less annoyed if it flopped if it were called something else, because if this does badly then we'll probably lose all chances of getting a decent adaptation out of the book. Then again, if this does well and they want to make more for some reason they'll be encouraged to go in the same direction... hrm. Bit of a catch-22 there.

 

It would be a hard book to translate into a movie given it's structure. Maybe it's best just left alone. As I have said on some of the star wars threads, more is not always better.

 

A straight up adaptation of the book in documentary style could have been a lot of fun, but I have nothing against the WWZ trailer. Swarming locust zombies seems like a pleasant addition to the genre.

 

Brad Pitt looks like a crazed homeless man in the trailers.

 

Yeah, documentary style would have been the way to go if you were going to do it. It doesn't lend itself well to the typical protagonist driven, central narrative, type of typical summer blockbuster.

That's the problem, they want to make it something it was never intended to be

 

Right. They're going straight for the Emmerich 2012 disaster film audience. Could be a $200 million mistake.

 

Agreed, but sometimes there are books that seem quite cinematic already, and I feel WWZ is one of them. It's a very visual book, due to the interview nature of it, and I feel like those flashbacks would work well adapted to the big screen because of that. I mean, I would personally love to see things like the feral girl's experiences in the church or the Battle of Hope (and Yonkers) or the Japanese otaku trying to escape his apartment.

 

Exactly

 

I can understand why they would be scared of doing a movie that would essentially be an anthology of short films, sort of a zombie Twilight Zone movie. Those kinds of movies typically don't do well at all at the box office. And the mockumentary style isn't necessarily a box office champion either. I'm sure they talked about all those options and rejected them as commercially nonviable.

They decided they needed to have a character narrator so that the audience could view the global pandemic through a single witness's eyes, in this case the "crazed homeless man."

 

i hope brad pitt will be trashing this during his press tour.

 

He can't. It's his production company.

 

oof

 

Strange new and highly uninformative article about the difficulties of promoting Word War Z to a broad summer audience.